CNN's Crowley on Dems' "old message": "[W]e don't support the troops and we're not tough on national security"

On the February 26 edition of CNN's The Situation Room, CNN senior political correspondent Candy Crowley claimed that Democrats looking toward the 2008 presidential elections have to say, "We cannot send that old Democratic message about how we don't support the troops and we're not tough on national security."

As Media Matters for America noted, in October 2006, Crowley presented a segment on CNN looking at the Democrats' prospects in the midterm elections in which she made the baseless assertion that Democrats have been "on the losing side of the values debate, the defense debate and, oh yes, the guns debate." In the segment, Crowley aired only negative opinions of the Democratic Party, such as those of an Asheville, North Carolina, resident who called the Democrats "losers." At no point during the segment did Crowley say, air, or quote anything positive about Democrats. Additionally, in the wake of the 2004 presidential election, Crowley portrayed Sen. John Kerry (D-MA) as out of touch because he drinks green tea, suggesting that green tea is a rare and exotic beverage unfamiliar to "most of America."

From the February 26 edition of CNN's The Situation Room at 4 p.m. ET:

WOLF BLITZER (host): And so, Candy, how does all this debate right now over the war, the authorization for the war, the funding for the war, the surge -- how does it play out in the 2008 presidential election?

CROWLEY: Well, what's going to be interesting here is you now have probably all five of the Democrats out there with their variations of what is generally the same plan, but they do have some different ones when it gets down to [Sen. Christopher J.] Dodd [D-CT] and [Sen. Joseph R.] Biden [D-DE].

So what they have to do is once again show that they are tough on the president, that they understand the message of the '06 election. But they also have to look toward '08 and say, "We cannot send that old Democratic message about how we don't support the troops and we're not tough on national security."

So they're walking that same line, only in a much more public way and much more individually.

BLITZER: On the Democratic side.

—R.C.