Morning After

UPDATE: Somehow I missed the two David Rosenbaum fact checks of the presidential debates (here and here and the one he did for the VP debate. But as it happens, I didn't miss much. They're all along the lines of what Media Matters describes as falsely balanced checks. For instance, this correction of a Kerry comment:

Mr. Kerry criticized Mr. Bush for poor relations with "the civil rights leadership," saying he was "the first president ever, I think, not to meet with the N.A.A.C.P." and had never met the Congressional Black Caucus. Mr. Bush is the first president since Hoover to have never spoken at the annual N.A.A.C.P. meeting, but he has met members of the caucus at least twice and has also appeared before the Urban League.

As Media Matters points out:

The Washington Post noted in an October 14 article that "Kerry's overall charge was correct." In the debate, Kerry stated, "This is a president who hasn't met with the Black Congressional [sic] Caucus," and Bush rarely has. The Post noted that Bush did meet with the Congressional Black Caucus on January 31, 2001 -- during his first two weeks in office -- but since then, he has repeatedly turned down requests to meet with them. According to the Post, "Caucus members have complained that not only has Bush refused to meet with them on specific issues, including his plans to attack Iraq, but also the White House often has not even responded to their letters." As for a second meeting, the Post reported that "Bush dropped by a meeting that national security adviser Condoleezza Rice had with the caucus earlier this year."

Regarding Bush's record on meeting with civil rights groups including the NAACP, Bush has rejected four consecutive invitations to speak at the NAACP's annual convention and stated on July 9 that "he has a 'basically nonexistent' relationship with the NAACP's leadership," according to The Washington Post. The Post also noted that the NAACP has said that Bush is the first president since Warren G. Harding (president from 1921-23) who has not met with them during his time in office.

But still, they did fact check them and I said they didn't. My apologies.

/UPDATE

The NYT stubbornly refuses to fact check the debates. But if you go into their coverage with the understanding that the reporting is designed to simply record the back and forth of what the candidates said and the analysis is angled to dramatize the last few weeks of the campaign, you won't be disappointed. If you want to know when you were being lied to, check the internets.

The job of getting the last debate over with so we can move on to the more exciting end stage of the campaign fell to Nagourney the Noble and Robin Toner. They turn in an evenhanded rundown of the ninety minutes, with the occasional insight:

There were two major domestic issues - the environment and energy - that did not come up.

Thank you!

Todd Purdom does a good job getting us excited about the weeks ahead with his analysis column. But how's this for a frank and long overdue look at the race:

By many empirical measures, the race has been Mr. Kerry's to lose all year.

For months, Mr. Bush has struggled to raise his job approval ratings above 50 percent, polls have shown a clear majority of the public thinks the country is on the wrong track and events on the ground in Iraq and official inquiries in Washington have combined to raise widespread questions about the administration's rationale for war there, and widespread doubts about its conduct. All that is bad news for any incumbent, especially one who owed his ultimate victory to a single vote on the Supreme Court.

But since Sept. 11, 2001, Mr. Bush has remained buoyed by his consistently strong ratings on handling terrorism, and Mr. Kerry has never managed to open a clear, sustained lead in the horse race - even when polls showed viewers believed by lopsided margins that he had outperformed Mr. Bush in the first debate. That is bad news for any challenger, especially one in such an otherwise favorable environment.

Wow, huh? I guess the NYT was waiting for the campaign to really start before it laid out the facts.

On the other hand, he left out that both candidates avoided answering some questions and how NCLB was a crutch for BushCo. Minimun wage? NCLB! Job creation? NCLB is a jobs bill! Everyone in D.C. hates each other? The bipartisan NCLB was passed on my watch!

Purdom also said that neither candidate made a major gaffe, which is strange since BushCo flatly lied when he said that he had said he wasn't worried about bin Laden. And Kerry inexplicably told us that the Congressional Black Caucus had never met with BushCo, which was as wrong as you can get.

I know the editors and reporters of the NYT watched the debate and picked up on the same things that everyone blogging it did. But they dole out the obvious criticisms of the night (from Schieffer on down) in bits and pieces, if at all. I'm all for an honest dissection of the debate, mostly because I know that my guy will come out on top. But even if he wouldn't, it would be a real help to readers if the paper of record would brutally fact check what was told to us and what was left out last night. There's an election coming up after all.