BY DAN
KENNEDY
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Tuesday, January 13, 2004
Canellos calls Dean a liar - and
gets it wrong. The Boston Globe's Washington-bureau chief,
Peter Canellos, has hit the Iowa campaign trail to find out what it
is that makes Howard Dean tick. Canellos's answer: anger.
Grrr! Where have we heard that before?
But Media Log was especially struck
by this Canellos passage, since it suggests that he simply hasn't
been paying attention:
Now, Dean's tendency to
shoot from the hip has become an issue unto itself, as the other
candidates contend, reasonably, that Dean's arguments don't always
square with the facts. Take his oft-repeated insistence that
"there was no middle-class tax cut." There was. It just wasn't
nearly as big as the cut for the wealthy.
Did Canellos accurately portray
what Dean has been saying? Not even close. Here's Dean at the Des
Moines Register debate
of January 4:
Well, we've got to look at
the big picture. If you make over $1 million, you've got a
$112,000 tax cut. Sixty percent of us got a $304 tax
cut.
And the question I have for
Americans is, did your college tuition go up more than $304
because the president cut Pell Grants in order to finance his tax
cuts for his millionaire friends? How about your property taxes,
did they go up more than $304 because the president wouldn't fund
special ed, wouldn't fund No Child Left Behind, wouldn't fund COPS
and - how about your health care payments? Did they go up more
than $304 because the president cut thousands of people all over
America off health care because he wouldn't fund the states' share
that they needed to continue to insure people, and that was
shifted to insurance and the health care premiums?
Middle-class people did not see
a tax cut. There was no middle-class tax cut. There was a Bush tax
increase with tuitions, with property taxes, with health care
premiums, and most middle-class people in this country are worse
off because of President Bush's so- called tax cut than they are
better off.
Now, I have no idea whether Dean's
$304 figure is a fair representation of the middle-class tax cut.
Some of his critics - like John Kerry - have argued that it was
actually quite a bit more than that, and that it was pushed through
by Democrats over Republican objections.
But Dean's rhetorical intent is
absolutely clear: to disparage the Bush-era middle-class tax cut as
piddling, and to argue that it was more than offset by increases in
property taxes, college tuition, and health care caused by Bush's
ridiculous tax cuts for the rich - tax cuts that we now know,
thanks
to Paul O'Neill and Ron Suskind,
even Bush thought were absurd.
It's very simple. Canellos
mischaracterized Dean, and then used that mischaracterization to
build his case that Dean is an angry guy who has a "tendency to paint
complex issues in very stark terms."
The truth is that it's Canellos who
is shooting from the hip here.
posted at 9:20 AM |
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MEDIA LOG ARCHIVES
Dan Kennedy is senior writer and media critic for the Boston Phoenix.
