Kerry: Bring 'em on
Newspapers, that is - candidate reads avidly
By John Nichols
August 7, 2004
John Kerry and George W. Bush, the Democrat and Republican who will compete this November for the presidency, both attended similar New England preparatory schools, both went to Yale and both received advanced degrees from prestigious East Coast colleges.
But somewhere along the way, they developed dramatically different reading habits.
Where Bush says he does not read newspapers, Kerry says he cannot get enough of them. And that distinction, Kerry suggested when he sat down this week for a rare extended interview on media issues, sums up a radically different vision of how a president should gather and process information to use in making fundamental decisions about the direction of the nation and the world.
"I read four or five papers a day if I can," Kerry said when asked about his newspaper reading habits. "It depends obviously on where I am and what I'm doing. I always pick up a local paper in the hotel I'm staying at, or two depending on what the city is. And I try to get the Washington Post, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, USA Today, papers like that. I try to read as much as I can."
Those patterns are similar to most former presidents. Dwight Eisenhower read nine papers daily and Ronald Reagan was such an avid consumer of newspapers that his ex-wife Jane Wyman complained about his print media obsessions. Presidents George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton were known to read stacks of papers each day.
But Kerry's penchant for the papers clearly distinguishes him from the current President Bush, who was asked by Fox News anchor Brit Hume how he gets his news and replied that he asks an aide, "What's in the newspapers worth worrying about?"
Bush added, "I glance at the headlines just to kind of (get) a flavor of what's moving. I rarely read the stories."
Instead of gathering information himself, Bush said, he prefers to "get briefed by people who probably read the news themselves" and "people on my staff who tell me what's happening in the world."
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