“Restructuring”

I guess "reframing" is out of style at the New York Times. They report that Barack Obama is "restructuring" his statement that lives of Americans who have died in the war in Iraq were "wasted". And he's willing to apologize if anyone was offended by his remark.

And he may have done severe damage to his campaign that simply.

As he arrived in New Hampshire, Mr. Obama said he would “absolutely apologize” to military families if they were offended by a remark he made in Iowa while criticizing the Bush administration’s Iraq policy.

“What I would say — and meant to say — is that their service hasn’t been honored,” Mr. Obama told reporters in Nashua, N.H., “because our civilian strategy has not honored their courage and bravery, and we have put them in a situation in which it is hard for them to succeed.”

A New Hampshire reporter asked Mr. Obama whether he regretted the remark, made at a rally on Sunday that “we ended up launching a war that should have never been authorized and should have never been waged, and to which we now have spent $400 billion and have seen over 3,000 lives of the bravest young Americans wasted.”

Frankly, he should have flat out apologized, no equivocations, no qualifiers, no "Gee, sorry you took offense". Kerry learned that the hard way. He says he did realize it was a mistake the moment he said it. So whether he's sorry because the remark was wrong or sorry that he said how he really feels doesn't really matter.