It's easy enough to say that all parties do everything equally -- the classic American defense of moderation -- but I do think there are important differences in the rhetoric that tends to get used by right and left. Style is indeed substance. Liberals a la Clinton like to confess their errors. They know how to get people to feel for them. But conservatives don't like to do this, because they're afraid of being seen as navel-gazers concerned with the past. That's the generous interpretation; the ungenerous one would be that they can't scrutinize their own actions. When Bush was asked in the run-up to the 2000 election about his biggest mistake, he said it was trading away Sammy Sosa. (Which was possibly true, since he hadn't done much in his life to that point.) But in the most recent GOP presidential debate not one of the candidates could come up with a credible answer to the question about their greatest mistake, even though they should have thought about it, since Bush has been asked about it over and over again during his administration!
