January 25, 2004

Death by Soundbite

Presidential campaigns are usually driven by soundbites. Bush says for example that he wants to only appoint "strict constructionist judges". There's a whole lot of information hiddeb behind that icon if you just click on it. For both liberals and conservatives, we take that term to mean that he's going to appoint people who will take an aggressive stance against abortion and a host of other issues.

But as , there is often not much there there. Wonder what would happen if we would've actually gotten a chance to see Bush (or others) pressed to expand their definitions a bit. While I don't think Bush is particularly "smart like that" (I don't think he's stupid....I just don't think he's smart in the way that a Nobel prize winner in Economics is smart), I'm surprised that he couldn't give a nice succinct answer to a really simple question: What is a strict constructionist judge?