Ground Game

The conservative blog Just One Minute catches some of the traditional media in a bit of revisionism  that appears to benefit Obama. First, the material:

"Senator Clinton got it wrong. She didn't read the National Intelligence Estimate. Jay Rockefeller read it, but she didn't read it. I don't know what all that experience got her because I have enough experience to know that if you have a National Intelligence Estimate, and the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee says, 'You should read this, this is why I'm voting against the war,' that you should probably read it," Mr. Obama said to thunderous applause.:

Seems innocuous, but...

But Mr. Rockefeller voted for the war. It was Florida Democratic Sen. Bob Graham, now retired, who chaired the committee in 2002, urged colleagues to read the briefing paper and voted against the war.

Obama spokeswoman Jennifer Psaki insisted that "there was nothing intentionally misleading" about Mr. Obama's statement. The core issue, she said, was whether Mrs. Clinton made a correct and informed decision. "I don't think the people in the audience care who Jay Rockefeller is," she said.

That certainly seems believable enough. Presidential candidates give a lot of speeches and say a lot of things they must later correct. With John McCain, we've seen his verbal gaffes twisted out of context ("100 years in Iraq") and we've seen them simply treated with amusement for the harmless miscues they are ("I'm a conservative, liberal Republican'). 

But in this case, Just One Minute tracks the time line of how Obama's inaccuracy was treated by the media. First, the AP runs the initial telling as is. But in the Los Angeles Times' version, the inaccuracy is removed without providing proper context, with the New York Times following suit.

One more problem: Just One Minute additionally notes that even if Obama has used Graham's name, the anecdote would still be misleading. In Graham's own words, he voted against the Iraq war resolution because he didn't believe it went far enough:

Graham's basic theme was actually quite hawkish - he worried that the resolution did not include other terrorists groups and that the focus on Iraq was misdirected:

They say that passing this resolution is the equivalent of if the Alllies had declared war on Hitler. I disagree with that assessment of what this lesson of history means. In my judgment, passing this resolution tonight will be the equivalent of declaring war on Italy.