Here's a great column by Diane Francis in the Financial Post in Canada. The Kerry's are really something else, distasteful people.
Diane Francis
Financial Post
Thursday, October 28, 2004
Something's amiss south of the border in this hotly contested election.
How can it be that the two candidates are in a dead heat? This is exactly what happened in 2000, with Bush winning the election only after a controversial recount.
Have the American people not changed their minds despite the tumultuous events of the past four years? How can voters line up in nearly the same way after terrorist attacks, a stock market collapse and the deployment of armed forces to take over two nations?
In other words, this election may show that there is a structural rift in the United States, not a policy divide. If policies and actions by George Bush were really at issue why wouldn't voting patterns reflect a shift in either direction -- for or against? Or will it on election day?
There could be another explanation. I suspect that most of the so-called "undecided" voters are voting for Bush but are embarrassed to say so. The dislike for Bush, among his opposition, has become so vicious that any of his supporters are regarded as stupid or worse.
What the Democrats have been able to accomplish is to wage a form of class warfare by using the elites from Hollywood, the media and minorities to look down on Republicans as either religious fanatics or greedy capitalists interested in Saudi Arabian oil and tax cuts at the expense of the less fortunate. The result may be that Republicans, and Bush supporters in particular, are simply closeted.
So anything can happen on Tuesday, particularly since there's another curious development in polling so far.
Females appear to be less enamored with the Democrats than ever before. Some 60% voted for Al Gore in 2000, but Kerry's only captured 55% so far.
There are likely two reasons for this: fears about terrorism and a belief that Bush is most capable of defending America and the Teresa Factor.
I saw the Kerrys in action at a dinner held in 2002 at the World Economic Forum in Manhattan. They arrived late and joined our table of 10 people. She was unfriendly, bordering on hostile and both were aloof, left early and snubbed everyone from the Saudi prince sitting on Senator Kerry's right to the Mexican journalist, who sat on Mrs. Heinz-Kerry's left and attempted to chat to her in Portuguese, her mother tongue.
The haughty Mrs. Kerry is a silver-spooner who's enjoyed a privileged life and has the sensitivity of a Czarina.
She's been hidden from the campaign spotlight after a number of gaffes but last week she struck again, having to apologize for attacking Laura Bush as a woman who "has never held a real job in her life".
Her statement was both inaccurate and insulting. Laura Bush is a professional woman who was a teacher and librarian for nine years. After her twins were born, she stayed at home to raise them.
Mrs. Heinz-Kerry was not only wrong but insensitive, insinuating that a woman who stays at home with her children is not doing a "real job."
As commentators have pointed out, how would she know what raising children entailed? Mrs. Heinz-Kerry has always had a phalanx of servants and nannies. For her, staying at home is about selecting butlers, ordering gardeners around and choosing seating arrangements, correct cutlery and goblets. Thus their nicknames "cash and Kerry".In other words, Teresa Heinz-Kerry is as out of touch as was George Bush's father back in 1992 when he was surprised that optical scanners could read bar codes at grocery check-out counters.
Now we have a folksy George W. Bush in a blue collar with the common touch. He always has the genteel Laura by his side as does Dick Cheney whose wife appears everywhere with her husband in order to soften his image as a stern and heartless right-winger.
Meanwhile, John Kerry has taken up with Bill Clinton, as his significant other, and been delivering a mostly Republican message in a blue suit, talking about balancing budgets and improving the country's image abroad as though 70 years of anti-Americanism can be reversed because he and the missus speak French.
It's all very strange and perhaps the polls are as wrong down there as they were in Canada. Or maybe the voters, or polled respondents, have simply tuned the whole thing out and made up their minds before all the blah-blah-blah of talking heads began. |
