Ah, boy (god, man, shit), it’s been a while since I’ve ripped on Politico. This stems most directly from the fact that I simply don’t read it anymore, but I do read Spencer Ackerman who sagely points out the lunacy in a story purporting Dick Cheney and Barack Obama to be planning “dueling speeches” on national security policy. Of course, given that Politico’s rise to prominence grew with the 2008 campaign, it’s easy to see why they report on government like it’s a popularity contest, but seriously? Dick Cheney is a discredited hack and Barack Obama is the President of the United States. These speeches are not “dueling.” But even more egregious than the idiotic framing of the article is the substance, which recent public polling seems to completely and totally invalidate. Let’s go to the tape!
President Barack Obama will attempt to regain control of a boiling debate over anti-terrorism policy with a major speech on Thursday — an address that comes on the same day that former Vice President Dick Cheney will be weighing in with his own speech on the same theme.
Now while it’s certainly conventional wisdom that Republicans own “national security” — and indeed, they have for a while — it’s simply not true any more. But why take my word for it? Here’s some data (linked above), starting deep in the throes of the “Global War on Terror” in 2003:
As you can see, Democrats have steadily closed the gap while Republicans have slowly squandered their support. That’s the broader picture. But how about this “boiling debate” of which Barack Obama has lost control? That is, specifically on the question of whether Obama is doing a better job than Bush, or as Politico put it, “the only subject on which many Republicans believe they have been able to gain traction against a popular president and the Democratic majority.”
As you can see — even if Politico can’t — Obama’s policies poll better than Bush’s by roughly two to one. Naturally, the relevance of substance hasn’t much stopped Politico from writing inflammatory stories in the past, so there was no reason to expect it would stop them now, but alas, this publication is really a bad thing for American government.
