Jumping ship

The Orlando Sentinel has backed every Republican seeking the White House since Richard M. Nixon in 1968. Not this time.

"This president has utterly failed to fulfill our expectations," the Florida paper said in supporting John F. Kerry, prompting some angry calls and a few dozen cancellations.

... The Sentinel is among 36 newspapers that endorsed President Bush four years ago and have flip-flopped, to coin a phrase, into Kerry's corner. These include the Chicago Sun-Times, the Los Angeles Daily News and the Memphis Commercial Appeal, according to industry magazine Editor & Publisher. Bush has won over only six papers that backed Al Gore, including the Denver Post, which received 700 letters -- all of them protesting the move.

Nine more papers, including the Cleveland Plain Dealer yesterday, abandoned Bush after four years but did not support the Massachusetts senator. Instead, these papers -- the Detroit News, the Tampa Tribune and the New Orleans Times-Picayune among them -- threw up their collective hands and made no endorsement.

...All told, Kerry leads Bush 142 to 123 in endorsements, and when measured by circulation, 17.5 million to 11.5 million, Editor & Publisher says.

...Kerry won over some editorial boards through personal campaigning. Earlier in the year, said the Sentinel's Healy, she believed that "Kerry was too liberal for us as a senator from Massachusetts." But through an hour-long interview with the board and the presidential debates, "we became convinced he would be moderate as president, and more moderate than President Bush in terms of fiscal responsibility and the war, in terms of bringing in international cooperation."

WaPo article

Imagine deciding offhand that someone would be too liberal simply on the basis of their residency in Massachusetts. I would think you might have a better understanding if you read their policy proposals, but maybe that's just me.

If that's how the Sentinel has been picking its endorsees, its readership is getting poor leadership.

The article doesn't say which, if any, of the papers switching their endorsements have changed ownership or editorial board members. That possibly accounts for some of the jumps, but if I had to guess, I'd say not many. Most interesting are the decisions by traditional Republican editors not to endorse either candidate.

In its no-one-to-endorse editorial, the Tampa Tribune put it this way: "We cannot support Bush because of his mishandling of the war in Iraq, record deficits pending, assault on open government and failed promise to be a 'uniter not a divider,' but what Kerry stands for is unclear."

Again, perhaps the editors should read his policy statements.

Maybe we could just leave the office empty for a while? It's time we realized that the two-party system is not serving America or democracy.

Update 9:50 am:

For the first time in 80 years, the New Yorker has endorsed a presidential candidate. In one of the longest and strongest editorial endorsements we've seen, the New Yorker editors blast Bush and comes on strong for Kerry. It trounces Bush on virtually every front...from the war in Iraq to Ashcroft and the excesses of the Patriot Act, to its secrecy in the war on terror, to the economy and more.

Talk Left article