If you’re feeling super-geeky today, see the Post story on Bush that sits on the page opposite the Kerry-Medicare story. (If you tried to find the Bush-on-the-stump story on the Post home page today, sorry. They do have two links to Kerry stories, but not to the president.) Read the Kerry story, then the Bush story. Here’s something funny. One way you can tell which candidate the newspaper favors is how the Kerry story has no rebuttal from the Bush camp, but whoa, here is paragraph 14 of the Bush story:
Kerry’s campaign said that is worse than any single year of the eight that Bill Clinton was president. Kerry aides said Bush does not mention that, on balance, the economy has lost 913,000 jobs since he was inaugurated in January 2001 — 1,650,000 in the private sector, partly offset by 737,000 added by the government. Kerry used the Democratic radio address to call the most recent jobs report “disappointing.” He said Bush “is now certain to be the first president since Herbert Hoover and the Great Depression who didn’t create a single job.”
The Post also needs a better weekend editor on the campaign beat. Here is paragraph number two: “Ohio, the seventh most populous state but the first in importance to the presidential campaigns of Bush and his Democratic challenger John F. Kerry, has lost more than 200,00 jobs since 2000, making it a ripe target for Kerry’s message that Bush has failed middle-class pocketbooks…” And here is paragraph seven, repeated exactly: “Ohio, the seventh most populous state, but the first in importance….”