Here’s today’s Kerryism from Slate: Kerry was asked in a C-SPAN interview,
We have had an FCC chairman who’s been a deregulator. I looked back in the records. You missed the vote in the Senate last fall which overturned his media ownership rules.
Slate’s edited version:
Kerry: Right. I wasn’t there for the vote.
What Kerry actually said:
Right, but I declared myself completely in favor of it. I wasn’t there for the vote, but I was 100 percent in favor of overturning his rules.
Maybe some reporters think it would be nice if candidates were slaves to questioners. “You’re the boss, Mr. Journalist. If you want to focus on some aspect of an issue, I am duty-bound to go along with you.
“I must set aside the point that I want to make; not only must I answer your question, that’s all I may do. If you have some agenda in what you want to convey to the public, I must follow your agenda, and completely ignore my own agenda. These are not the droids I’m looking for.”
But candidates don’t quite think that way, for some reason. Even noncandidates who know how debates operate realize the importance of articulating their own ideas, rather than limiting themselves to the narrow questions that the questioners ask. Sure, you shouldn’t duck the question — but you’re certainly allowed to give an answer that places the matter in more context. It’s better for you, and sometimes it’s even better for the audience, which gets a bigger picture.
The questioner, for whatever reasons of his own, wanted to focus on Kerry’s missing a vote. Kerry acknowledged this, but for perfectly understandable reasons of his own, also explained his stance on the merits.
The audience probably found Kerry’s supposed “caveat[] and curlicue[]” to be more interesting than the answer to the questioner’s narrow question. In any event, it made more sense from Kerry’s viewpoint. Maybe the journalist only wanted to hear about the missed vote, and not about Kerry’s underlying views. But why exactly should Kerry defer to the journalist’s preferences on this?
(One might have wanted more explanation from Kerry — for instance, why he thought [perhaps quite reasonably] that he didn’t need to be there for the vote. One might also conceivably fault Kerry for the redundant answer, though sometimes repetition is helpful for emphasis. But those aren’t the criticisms the Kerryism’s author was making.)
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