In a September 17 article about Democratic efforts to make President Bush “the marquee name in this fall's Congressional elections,” New York Times reporter Adam Nagourney uncritically reported Republican National Committee chairman Ken Mehlman's claim that the Democrats' effort to link GOP candidates in congressional and Senate races to Bush is unlikely to succeed because "[t]he last time this kind of morph ad was tried was in '98 when we tried to nationalize the races against [then-President Bill] Clinton and it didn't work."

Nagourney did not challenge Mehlman's comparison, which rests on a false assumption: that Bush's approval ratings are comparable to Clinton's at the equivalent period in Clinton's presidency. In fact, while Bush's “job approval rating continues to hover around 40 percent,” as Nagourney noted, Clinton's approval rating was never lower than 58 percent in 1998, according to the Gallup poll, as Media Matters for America has documented.