Dept. of 2004 campaign hindsight

Posted July 8th, 2008 at 11:43 AM in Journalism, Politics

In Time’s Swampland blog, we’re reminded of a GOP argument about small business taxes that President George W. Bush used in 2004: that John Kerry wanted to raise taxes on small businesses, which employ an astoundingly high percentage of the American workforce. It took Jay Newton-Small one paragraph to debunk the argument:

Bush loved to cite on the stump the plight of the 4.1 million “subchapter S” companies – another catagory of small businesses that have less than 100 shareholders and pay individual income taxes. As my former Bloomberg colleague Ryan Donmoyer — the best tax reporter in town — pointed out, the argument was a bit ridiculous because less than 5% of small businesses who file under sub-chapter S made more than $200,000, Kerry’s threshold in 2004.

I know folks who voted for Bush over Kerry because of this argument. Those voters likely didn’t know that Kerry’s proposal would only affect the 5% of “subchapter S” companies making more than $200,000 per year.

Is that the Kerry campaign’s fault, for not defending its plan to raise taxes and communicating the details more effectively? No.

Candidates are in this position a lot: the media distorts their position, but clarifying it in public would simply keep the story in another news cycle. And when the story is raising taxes, whether it’s a widespread tax increase or a small, justifiable one, Democrats are rightly reluctant to bring it up in front of cameras.

Questioning the president’s argument was the media’s job.

And yes, some reporters did write about the nuances of Kerry’s tax plan, but editors didn’t put it on Page 1. And Bush made the argument so many times in so many media markets that there were plenty of stories that quoted the president without explaining what was really going on.

Newton-Small demonstrates how easy it would have been for journalists to do their jobs. Take out the sentences setting up the paragraph I quote above, and you’re left with maybe a quarter of a column inch. That’s not a lot of space.

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