In theory, a platform gives voters a clear statement of where a party stands. In reality, it is a carefully crafted sales pitch by the victorious campaign, artfully designed to avoid giving any fresh ammunition to critics or the enemy party.
The DNC said this:
“…but guess what? The Los Angeles Times reported yesterday that the platform was, and I quote, ‘written at the direction of Romney’s campaign.’"
Then Anderson Cooper went
nuts.
The two quotes are from the same article. Is "carefully crafted" so much different than "written at the direction of"? Clearly the Times was assigning responsibility for the language in the entire document to the Romney campaign. Now that may or may not be true, I don't know, but it is certainly accurate to state that the Times reported that the platform was "written at the direction of Romney's campaign". That's what was reported. Twice. The first time was a bit ambiguous, and could have been interpreted to mean that the Romney campaign only meddled in a portion of the platform. The second time made it clear they were talking about the entire document.
Anderson Cooper's claim that the Romney campaign couldn't have written it because it was very similar to language from prior years is ridiculous. The people crafting the document are responsible for the whole document, not just the stuff they changed. If something was changed, it is because a decision was made to change it. If something stayed the same, it is because a decision was made to leave it unchanged. You can bet that no segment of the document got more scrutiny than the abortion language.
To claim that the group of individuals responsible for editing and approving the document are somehow not responsible for the language that they chose to keep substantially the same is absurd.
If the Romney campaign did not approve the abortion language, Anderson's beef should be with the LA Times assertion that they did, not Debbie Wasserman-Schultz for accurately quoting the article.