Democrats blame Bush for grant cuts that never happened / Conservatives fry Kerry with "French" charges (4/1)

By Ben Fritz, Bryan Keefer and Brendan Nyhan
Published in the Philadelphia Inquirer

Former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean may be out of the Democratic presidential race, but his legacy lives on in the form of a myth about students supposedly kicked off Pell Grants under President Bush, which is touted in a new Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee fundraising brochure (551K PDF).

Ever since an anonymous Bush adviser told the New York Times last April that John Kerry "looks French," Kerry's political adversaries have attempted to link the senator with France to portray him as aloof and opposed to America's interests. (Read the whole column.)

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4/1/2004 07:15:31 AM EST |

Spinsanity announces All the President's Spin (3/29)

We are proud to announce the upcoming release of our first book, All the President's Spin: George W. Bush, the Media and the Truth, which will be published in August by Touchstone/Fireside, an imprint of Simon & Schuster.

All the President's Spin will provide the definitive non-partisan account of the Bush administration's unrelenting dishonesty about public policy. The book will demonstrate how the White House has broken new ground in using misleading sales tactics to promote its policies and manipulate the media.

Of course, the President is not the only dishonest national politician, but he is surely the most influential. Bush's tactics threaten to change the nature of the presidency and further corrupt American political debate. That is why, rather than attacking his policies or ideology, our book will examine the public relations strategy the Bush administration has used to advance that agenda - its origins, how it works, and why it has been so effective at spinning the media.

In short, this is not a partisan book, nor are we changing the nature of our analysis. Our commitment to non-partisanship is steadfast; we will continue to hold Democrats and liberals accountable on the website, in our Philadelphia Inquirer column and elsewhere. But being non-partisan does not require that everything we write be mechanically balanced between criticism of both sides. In the future, we may well write books or articles focusing exclusively on liberals or Democrats, who have become increasingly aggressive in their rhetoric in recent months. But after almost three years of critiquing spin, we believe that Bush's presidency is the most important subject for an in-depth analysis.

More information on the book will be forthcoming in the weeks and months ahead. In the meantime, you can pre-order All the President's Spin from Amazon.com. Thanks again for reading!

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3/28/2004 07:10:54 PM EST |

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