You can read a rebuttal
here .
[snip]
"People who saw the show or read the transcript might well ask: What was the big deal?
The New York Times and The Washington Post pulled out the following "embarrassing" details: Russert quizzed Dean on the exact number of U.S. military personnel on active duty. Dean said there were between one and two million. The correct number is, in fact, right in the middle-1.4 million. Russert asked Dean how many troops are currently stationed in Iraq (a constantly fluctuating number). Dean said it was "in the neighborhood of 135,000 troops." The number is really 146,000, the Times pointed out.
How would President Bush do on a similar pop quiz? My guess is our current commander in chief couldn't answer those questions. But Russert made a big deal of Dean's failure to produce the precise figures from memory.
[snip]
What's really going on here?
Certainly Tim Russert has a reputation for being a tough interviewer, and for not letting anyone off the hook.
But as comedian and media gadfly Bob Sommerby pointed out on his website The Daily Howler (
www.dailyhowler.com), Russert's treatment of another governor who was running for President was completely different. In his first interview with candidate George W. Bush in 1999, Russert actually supplied some numbers:
Russert: "In your speech, you said that arms reductions are not our most pressing challenge. Right now, we have 7,200 nuclear weapons; the Russians have 6,000. What to you is an acceptable level?"
Bush: "That's going to depend upon the generals helping me make that decision, Tim. That's going to depend upon the people whose judgment I will rely upon to make sure that we have a peaceful world."
But if it was OK for Bush to fob off detailed policy discussions on a future team of advisers, for Dean the rules were different.
Before his combative interview with Dean, Russert went to Bush Administration officials at the Treasury Department to ask for budget data to attack Dean's plan to roll back the Bush tax cuts. Predictably, the Administration generated figures that showed a reversal of Bush tax policy would be a disaster for middle class Americans.
Parroting the Bush line, Russert challenged Dean: "Can you honestly go across the country and say, "I'm going to raise your taxes 4,000 percent [for married couples with two children] or 107 percent [for married retirees] and be elected?"
Dean stuck to his guns. "Were those figures from the Treasury Department, did you say, or CBO [the Congressional Budget Office]?" he asked. "I don't believe them."
Russert persisted: "But in the middle of an economic downturn, Howard Dean wants to raise taxes on the average of $1,200 per family."
Dean was vindicated the next day. In a short piece on June 23, The Washington Post noted the release of the Treasury Department report, calling it "a highly selective analysis of the cost to families of rolling back scheduled tax cuts" and quoting a Brookings Institution economist who poked holes in the figures. "The research was prepared at the request of Meet the Press," the Post noted, adding: "The analysis does not include single people or lower income couples, two groups that benefit little from Bush's cuts."
[snip]