A number of readers flagged George Stephanopoulos’ appearance on World News Tonight last night, in which he seemed to suggest that Obama had moved toward McCain’s position on more troops for Afghanistan, when in fact as we all know it was McCain who last week changed positions and basically adopted the Obama policy prescription. Now I see that Media Matters is calling out ABC on it, too.
Maybe I come at this from a slightly different angle because the initial reports from readers were that Stephanopoulos claimed Obama had taken McCain’s position on Afghanistan. So when I first saw the video myself, it fell short of being as egregious an error as I had expected:
It’s a terribly awkward and essentially misleading construction that Stephanopoulos uses three times there to describe the Bush-McCain collapse on key policies toward Afghanistan, Iraq and Iran. But it’s also clear that the underlying point he’s trying to make is accurate: that so long as the lines between Obama and McCain are blurred, then McCain has lost what he believe to be his own signature issue.
Then again, maybe George is so brainwashed by GOP foreign policy dominance that he may simply think it’s great for Obama that he’s now in lockstep with the Republicans, even though the Republicans came to him.
