Gun-toting Kerry courts hunters, Bush scouts Catholics
AFP: 10/21/2004
BOARDMAN, United States (AFP) - John Kerry grabbed a gun to scout the support of hunters and George W. Bush pitched to Roman Catholics as the two scratched for every vote that could swing the agonizingly tight presidential election.
A dozen days before the November 2 ballot, the bitter race gave every sign of lurching to the same wild finish as in 2000. Bush clung to the barest of leads in the national vote while Kerry ran strong in several key state contests.
With every vote likely to count in the critical midwestern battleground of Ohio that Bush won in 2000, the often staid Kerry donned a camouflage jacket and picked up a shotgun to hunt geese in a carefully staged photo-op.
The Massachusetts senator emerged from a cornfield, the shotgun breached and cradled in the crook of his elbow, while his companions held four dead birds. Asked why he wasn't carrying one himself, he quipped, "Too lazy."
The event testified to the weight of the powerful National Rifle Association, which has endorsed Bush and pledged to spend up to 20 million dollars to mobilize its four million members.
The NRA played an important role in Bush's election four years ago. Former president Bill Clinton acknowledged in his memoirs that the group hurt Democrat Al Gore "badly" among rural voters.
Kerry aides also said Thursday's hunt was aimed at presenting the candidate as "one of the boys" to counter Bush's jeans-clad appearances at his Texas ranch and try to win more support among men who favor the president.
The senator was already on a macho high, reveling in the dramatic comeback by his Boston Red Sox baseball team as they beat their hated rivals the New York Yankees to book a berth in the World Series finals.
Kerry has made more than two-dozen campaign visits to Ohio, where he is popular in cities hard-hit by job losses and Bush holds sway in rural areas. Polls show the statewide race a virtual dead heat.
The Democrat was to attend a rally later Thursday with Dana Reeve, the wife of the late actor Christopher Reeve, who promoted stem-cell research as a possible cure for his spinal-cord injury. Bush opposes the research.
Bush was slated to travel to the town of Downingtown, Pennsylvania, where he was expected to emphasize his opposition to gay marriage and meet with the archbishop of Philadelphia in an attempt to attract the Catholic vote.
Catholics voted narrowly Democratic four years ago. But the president, a born-again Methodist, took the majority of white Catholic votes in 2000 and leads among them this year.
Kerry, the first Catholic candidate for president since John Kennedy in 1960, has struggled to boost his share of the denomination's vote. Catholics represent about a fourth of the US electorate, with many concentrated in key swing states.
Several analysts have suggested the race was heading towards the same nail-biting climax as in 2000, when the southeastern state of Florida handed the presidency to Bush by 537 votes after a recount dispute decided by the US Supreme Court.
Most national "tracking" polls showed Bush maintaining a statistically insignificant one-point lead over Kerry. But the challenger was holding his own in states such as Ohio and Florida, which went Republican four years ago.
Andrew Kohut, head of the Pew Research Institute, wrote Thursday in The New York Times that polls might remain unreliable until the final days of the race because voter opinion is "highly unstable."
"While many Americans are strongly committed to reelecting President Bush or getting rid of him, there remains a relatively large bloc of swing voters who are critical of the president but who still cannot comfortably back Senator Kerry," Kohut wrote.
10-21-2004, 17h36 |
