Does Kerry get his "news" from the headlines?

As widely reported by the NYT and other media, in his midnight rally after the close of the Republican National Convention, Sen. Kerry

lashed back at President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney tonight, saying that he would not remain quiet while his patriotism was being questioned by men who had not served in Vietnam and who had "misled the nation into Iraq.''

"We all saw the anger and distortion of the Republican Convention,'' Mr. Kerry said in excerpts of remarks, issued by his campaign, that he was to make later tonight in Ohio.

"For the past week, they attacked my patriotism and my fitness to serve as commander in chief,'' Mr. Kerry said.  "Well, here's my answer. I'm not going to have my commitment to defend this country questioned by those who refused to serve when they could have and by those who have misled the nation into Iraq.'' ...

Alluding to Mr. Cheney's convention speech on Wednesday evening, in which the vice president said the senator was not the right man to be commander in chief because of his "habit of indecision'' and a misunderstanding of the nature of terrorism, Mr. Kerry said:  "The vice president even called me unfit for office last night. I guess I'll leave it up to the voters whether five deferments makes someone more qualified to defend this nation than two tours of duty.''

(Boldface mine throughout [and last paragraph in blockquote added Sun Sep 5 @ 7pm].)  This apparently prompted many folks to wonder what exactly Sen. Kerry was talking about — what had gotten into him, and upon what factual sources was he relying for his accusations as to what Bush and Cheney had said about him during the RNC?  For example, Jim Geraghty noted in his  Kerry Spot on NRO:

Many, many, many Kerry Spot readers believe Kerry was drunk during his late-night Thursday rally. There is no evidence of this beyond people's interpretation of his behavior and speech, and I mention this rumor in order to disagree with it and to discourage it. Besides, the revelation that Kerry was mildly inebriated at the time would probably be good news for the Democrats.

CNN tells us that "Kerry said he listened to 'zero' of the four-day Republican convention in New York but had read the acceptance speech Bush delivered Thursday night." 

In his acceptance speech on Thursday night, Dubya said nothing specific to the question of either Sen. Kerry's patriotism or his military service.  But just before the convention, President Bush said of Kerry, in an August 26th interview with the NYT's Elisabeth Bumiller and David E. Sanger, "I don't think he lied [about his war record], and I think that he ought to be proud of his record."  On August 23rd, Dubya was widely quoted thusly:

Asked if he believed Kerry, who was decorated for bravery but later became a prominent opponent of the Vietnam war, had lied about his service, Bush said, "I think Sen. Kerry served admirably, and he ought to be proud of his record."

And in his convention speech, Vice President Cheney specifically said:

The president's opponent is an experienced senator. He speaks often of his service in Vietnam, and we honor him for it.

Without question, both Bush and Cheney made detailed arguments from which viewers, listeners, and readers of their speeches could well draw conclusions as to the relative fitness of Bush and Cheney for the nation's top two executive positions as compared to their opponents.  But neither of their convention speeches questioned Kerry's patriotism; neither denigrated Kerry's Vietnam service (and Cheney explicitly praised it); and the word "unfit" appears nowhere in either speech. 

Surely even the most polite politician cannot be faulted for claiming that he's more fit for office than his opponent; and it's quite a logical and semantic leap from more fit to "unfit" or "attacked my patriotism and my fitness," isn't it?  So where the heck did Sen. Kerry come up with his claim that Bush and/or Cheney had attacked his fitness or his patriotism?

Well, we have an excellent suspect in the Washington Post:  Ombudsman Michael Getler writes in Sunday's WaPo:

"Cheney Calls Kerry Unfit," read the big, front-page headline over a story in Thursday's Post about attacks on the Democratic challenger at the Republican convention in speeches by Vice President Cheney and Democratic Sen. Zell Miller of Georgia.

"Unfit" is a powerful, personally damning word; it has become even more explosive in the past several weeks because it is in the title of a best-selling book, "Unfit For Command" by John E. O'Neill and Jerome R. Corsi. The book is the cornerstone of a nationwide effort by a group called Swift Boat Veterans for Truth to challenge Sen. John F. Kerry's war record.

The problem is that Cheney never used the word "unfit." Yet the headline can be seen as reinforcing the Swift boat challengers' attack. The headline writer no doubt drew inspiration from the first paragraph of the story by reporter John F. Harris, who wrote that Cheney "reached back decades" into Kerry's life, "arguing in taunting language that the Democratic presidential nominee has demonstrated through his public statements and votes that he is unfit to be commander in chief in an age of terrorism."

You could draw that conclusion from listening to what Cheney did say. But that, in my view and those of some readers, was a poor choice of words and headline.  The headline went beyond what Cheney said and then spread the characterization across the front page.

Now, it's possible that Sen. Kerry was not misled by this WaPo headline, or similar ones elsewhere.  It's possible that instead he was engaging in the same sort of overstatement as the WaPo headline writer, for rhetorical purposes.  But using Occam's Razor, the correct explanation may be the simplest one.  Kerry thought Cheney said Kerry was unfit because the WaPo headline said that was what Cheney said.

In a post I wrote some months ago entitled "You'd rather Dubya watch Rather?" I expressed my amusement and disgust when the mainstream media, egged on by Dubya's critics, made a big hoohah over President Bush's "revelation" that he relies heavily upon his staff to read, digest, and succinctly brief him on newspaper and other media reports, rather than trying to comb through them himself.  I wrote,

So how would you rather the President of the United States spend his time? Reading what the New York Times is speculating about, which is in turn based on what someone has leaked about what the CIA has just learned about the leadership of Iran? Or reading what the Director of Central Intelligence has just written about what the CIA has just learned about the leadership of Iran?

And maybe the President should've tuned in to the BBC to get Andrew Gilligan's take on how the Third Infantry Division was doing in its advance toward Baghdad, rather than relying on filtered information from Gen. Tommy Franks via Rumsfield. Yeah, that's the ticket!

But Kerry's incredible midnight rally suggests that, indeed, he may be relying on the equivalent of Andrew Gilligan in getting his "news."  Not only does it appear that Kerry's reading misleading headlines, it appears that he may be failing to read what's beneath them — and that he's acting on those misleading headlines in staking out his campaign positions.

If so, it's a shallow, shoddy, and dangerous practice.  If so, Sen. Kerry's staff is serving him poorly, or he's making poor use of the resources available to him, or both.  But if not — if he actually knew what Bush and Cheney did say and didn't say, and just chose to exaggerate it for rhetorical purposes — I guess that would leave me feeling strangely relieved.  Politics as usual, including disingenuousness, is preferable to the candidate being miserably ill-informed, I suppose.

One way or another, this small episode may say something important about the relative fitness of Sen. Kerry and President Bush.  But I'll leave it to my readers to draw their own conclusions about whether it goes so far as to show that Sen. Kerry's not just less fit, but unfit.

(Hat-tip to PrestoPundit and Betsy's Page.)