AP Begins to Use HRC Campaign Frame

Josh Marshall over at TPM noticed something startling. To understand why it's important, however, requires a little context.

For all practical purposes, Hillary's path to the nomination requires that an overwhelming majority of super delegates decide to override the wishes of the voters as expressed in the majority of the primaries, the majority of the caucuses, and in the popular vote. Last Friday, Nancy Pelosi went on record saying such a move would be bad for the Democratic Party.  

"If the votes of the superdelegates overturn what's happened in the elections," said Pelosi, "it would be harmful to the Democratic Party."

So, if you're Sen. Clinton, how do you continue your campaign for the nomination without arousing suspicion that your strategy is ultimately bad for the party?

One approach is to remove the appearance of impropriety from the possibility that super delegates might trump the results of the caucuses and primaries. And you pave the way for that by getting everyone to adopt a new vocabulary.

So, last February there was this:

In a sign that the spin war over the significance of super-delegates is underway in earnest, Harold Ickes told assorted Hillary supporters on a private conference call yesterday that the campaign wants them to start referring to super-delegates as "automatic delegates," according to someone on the call...

The worry appears to be that the phrase "super-delegates" implies that "they have super-powers or super influence when they don't," the source says, describing Ickes' thinking. In other words, the phrase suggests that they have greater than average clout and that they have the power to overrule the democratic process, giving it the taint of back-room power politics.

As Marshall noted earlier today, one of the writers at the Associated Press has started to use the Clinton Campaign's recommended vocabulary.

On Saturday, Mike Glover from the AP wrote the following in his coverage of the Iowa caucus returns:

Democratic Party projections said the results mean Obama increased by seven the number of delegates he collects from the state, getting a total of 23 compared to 14 for Clinton and seven for Edwards, with one to be decided.

Twelve automatic delegates bring the state's total to 57. Obama has been endorsed by four of those and Clinton three, with the remainder uncommitted.

At this point, two questions need to be asked. First, is there any precedent for referring to super delegates as "automatic delegates" prior to the Clinton Campaign's insistence starting last February? Second, what's wrong with a journalist adopting the vocabulary and framing advocated by one of the two campaigns?

Regarding the first question, I honestly don't know whether anyone's spoken of "automatic delegates" before 2008. But even if there was some vague historical precedent for referring to super delegates as "automatic delegates," it hasn't been standard during this primary season. So the propriety of changing politically significant vocabulary in the middle of the game is what's at issue, and that takes us to the second question.

Marshall's explanation is sufficient.

Now, sometimes spinning campaigns come up with phrases that are so heavy-handedness and tendentious that it's just ridiculous -- the "death tax", "personal accounts" for Social Security privatization, etc. In this case, I think you've probably got to have your head pretty deep in the delegat-ology weeds to have any sense of whether it matters to use one term over another.

But I think it's a good journalistic principle not to switch terminology in the midst of an election campaign or public policy debate at the bidding of one party or another, unless someone makes an extremely good case that the existing word choices are patently misleading. And doing it at the behest of one party to the dispute is almost always bad practice. Otherwise the journalists whose job it is to sift through the spin become its messengers, wittingly or not.

Of course, this isn't the first time writers from the Associated Press have chosen to use politically loaded vocabulary. If you opposed the invasion of Iraq back in 2003, you might recall the numerous AP articles which treated support for the war as support for the troops and vice-versa.

So, if you start to see the phrase 'automatic delegates' in press reports on the delegate race, you'll now know why that is. Of course, things don't have to come to that. You can contact the AP here: [e-mail]

And you can let the AP know that adopting politically significant changes in vocabulary is tantamount to biased reporting, especially when that vocabulary is explicitly recommended by one of the major campaigns for its own advantage. Supposedly, such biased reporting is contrary to the "values and principles" of the Associated Press. Perhaps the AP just needs a friendly reminder.