During a presidential campaign—any presidential campaign—two candidates start out on opposing sides of the political spectrum. They disagree boldly. They promote distinctly different positions. And then, as election day nears, they abandon their bold proposals and adopt the Goldilocks approach. Not too left, not too right, just center.
This is how campaign rhetoric works, and campaign reporters have to look past this and evaluate the candidates’ positions based on their legislative records and their pre-presidential-campaign positions. This is how the public and the press avoid getting spun in the talking points tornado.
Today’s piece in the Los Angeles Times ignores these rules of engagement when asserting that McCain’s and Obama’s foreign policy positions aren’t that different.
Even as they campaign on their differences, John McCain and Barack Obama have been quietly recalibrating their messages on foreign policy in ways that often have moved them closer to the political center — and to each other.
Well, yes, the candidates are tweaking their messages to appeal to the greatest number of voters so that they can, um, win the election.
In a strangely anonymous quote—couldn’t they get someone to say this on the record?—an unidentified political strategist says:
Everybody’s trying to grab the same voters in the middle,” said a Democratic strategist who was not authorized to speak for the Obama campaign and did not want to be identified. “They’re reading the same polls and competing for the same voters.
Still, you can’t confuse “record” and “rhetoric,” “policy position” and “stump speech.” McCain and Obama do have substantially different ideas on foreign policy—differences that may come to the forefront in tonight’s debate, and ones that ought not be brushed over.
A few examples: Obama favors meeting with international leaders without pre-conditions; McCain does not. Obama is ardently committed to restoring America’s standing in the world damaged by the Bush presidency; this is much less central to McCain’s world view. McCain is more hawkish; Obama favors diplomacy. Obama called for restraint in the first days of the Russia-Georgia conflict; McCain proclaimed “We are all Georgians.”
The list is long and the differences are stark. If the candidates move toward the center at the stump, it is the media’s job to remind voters what roads they took to get there. And, if the highway and byways take the shape of hairpin curves and U-turns, the media needs to help voters, forgive the extended metaphor, read the map.
Katia Bachko is on staff at The New Yorker.