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Politics : WHO IS RUNNING FOR PRESIDENT IN 2004 -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: American Spirit who wrote (5648)	10/21/2003 1:53:54 PM
From: Glenn Petersen	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 10965

GOP Sees Gephardt as Toughest Rival for Bush Many Say Midwest Is Key to Election washingtonpost.com By Jim VandeHei Washington Post Staff Writer Tuesday, October 21, 2003; Page A02 With the strongest union backing and deepest roots in the politically important industrial Midwest, Rep. Richard A. Gephardt (Mo.) is emerging as the Democratic presidential candidate many prominent Republicans fear the most in the 2004 elections. In interviews with nearly two dozen Republican strategists, lawmakers and state chairmen across the country, including several close to the White House, Gephardt was portrayed by a majority as the Democratic candidate best prepared and positioned to defeat President Bush in a head-to-head matchup next year. The reasons, they said: Gephardt consistently supported the Iraq war, enjoys unrivaled support among union leaders and hails from the Midwest, where many Republicans believe the presidential election will be decided. They also cited his health care plan, experience and discipline as key factors. "When [we] look at the whole picture and who can get [Democrats] there . . . people are saying Gephardt is the biggest threat," said Rep. Mike Rogers (Mich.), finance chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee. A few mentioned retired Gen. Wesley K. Clark as a potentially strong challenger, but every Republican predicted Bush would win reelection. Still, their views about Gephardt (and some of his rivals) highlight the GOP's top concerns heading into 2004: job losses in key swing states, the high number of uninsured workers, the fallout from Bush's steel tariffs and the president's political standing in the industrial Midwest. With his plan to lower the cost of health care for most Americans, "Gephardt has hit on a real Achilles' heel, and he will get traction on it if he becomes the nominee," said Rep. Ray LaHood (R-Ill.). By historical standards, Bush remains popular with voters more than a year out from the election and gets high marks for integrity and strong leadership skills. At the same time, polls show Gephardt, Clark, former Vermont governor Howard Dean and Sen. John F. Kerry (Mass.), among others, being competitive in matchups with the president. Many Democrats do not agree with the GOP assessment of Gephardt's electability. The AFL-CIO has declined to endorse the Missouri lawmaker, despite his relentless courting, because several union leaders are not convinced Gephardt can win. In recent interviews in New Hampshire and Iowa, the two key early voting states, numerous Democratic voters have characterized Gephardt as stale, programmed and too closely affiliated with Washington. In Iowa, where Gephardt spends most of his time campaigning, Dean is doing as well or better in recent polls. Bill McInturff, a GOP pollster, said he thinks Gephardt would be a weak candidate because he has called for a repeal of the Bush tax cuts. And Frank Luntz, a former GOP pollster who has conducted focus groups for MSNBC, said Gephardt "falls absolutely flat" with voters because he is seen as too political. One of the main reasons many other Republicans fret about Gephardt is the electoral map, which many in the GOP say points to the Midwest as the region that will decide the presidency. Several senior Bush administration officials consider Gephardt, a family man of humble origins in Missouri, the most serious threat because he "matches up better culturally" with the president than do Dean and Kerry, who are easier to paint as "eastern liberal elitists," a Bush adviser said. "I have probably heard more people saying Gephardt looks the strongest because Dean is too far left and Kerry is not panning out as a candidate," added former representative Vin Weber (R-Minn.). The Midwest is loaded with states that candidates consider must-wins for the presidency. They include Ohio, which every Republican president in history has won, and Missouri, which has voted for the winner in all but one election since 1900. Although southern Democrats have the best track record for winning recent presidential elections -- think Bill Clinton, Jimmy Carter, Lyndon B. Johnson -- Sen. John Edwards (N.C.) lags far behind the other candidates in the field. Clark, the only other southerner, entered the race only last month. Scott Reed, who managed Robert J. Dole's GOP presidential campaign in 1996, said that it is too early to determine who matches up best with Bush but that the political map appears to favor Gephardt. "If you look at the electoral college map and where a lot of the polls sit today, all arrows point to the Midwest as the battleground," Reed said. "If they can nominate someone from the battleground region, they will have a slight leg up." The Midwest has been hit hard by manufacturing job losses under Bush. In Michigan, Bush is under fire not only for mounting job losses but also for his decision to impose tariffs on steel, which has hurt automakers and other businesses there and in other states by driving up production costs. Several Republicans cited Bush's steel policy as among his biggest liabilities. Moreover, Michigan's GOP congressional delegation is fuming at Bush because the White House has refused to intervene on behalf of the state's furniture manufacturers, which have a strong presence in Republican strongholds in the state. Michigan is a "very economic-driven state," Rogers said. "If [Michigan residents] are not working, they won't vote for Bush." In Galesburg, Ill., just outside LaHood's district, Maytag Corp. recently announced it is closing a plant, laying off 1,600 workers and moving the jobs to Mexico. By railing against Mexico's trading practices and free trade in general, Gephardt is considered the biggest defender of workers among the Democrats "hands down" and best positioned to oust Bush, LaHood said. Gephardt has been a forceful critic of Bush's trade policies and vowed to curtail foreign trade if elected. In a recent Ohio poll conducted by the University of Cincinnati, Gephardt matched up best against Bush among the Democratic candidates (though he trailed by 13 percentage points). As the conservative Wall Street Journal editorial page highlighted on Tuesday, Ohio lost 118,000 manufacturing jobs from March 2002 to March 2003. But Robert T. Bennett, chairman of the Ohio Republican Party, said Clark might pose bigger problems for Bush because elections in the state are often decided by swing voters. "Clark would be the one -- the non-politician, the general," Bennett said. "He would be the one who would be the toughest if he can get the nomination." Clinton carried Ohio in 1992 and 1996; Bush won it in 2000. But most Republicans said turning out party activists will be more important than wooing swing voters next year. Some Republicans fear Gephardt alone could persuade the unions, perhaps the most influential Democratic constituency and one with the potential to spend tens of millions of dollars, to treat the 2004 election like "their last hurrah," said Grover Norquist, a GOP activist close to Bush political adviser Karl Rove. Bush has been at odds with the unions throughout his presidency. Norquist said Republicans are most worried about Gephardt inciting a passionate union effort that will stir African American turnout to historic highs in big cities and key areas across the country such as Florida. Gephardt is best positioned to exploit Bush's weaknesses on the economy and jobs because he effectively neutralized one of Bush's greatest strengths -- national security -- by taking a hard line early against Iraq and Afghanistan, said Rick Davis, who managed the presidential campaign of Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) in 2000. "There's not a lot of daylight between" Bush and Gephardt on how to handle Iraq and Afghanistan," Davis said. "If he can survive [the primary], he's actually well positioned on foreign policy and national security." As House minority leader in 2002, Gephardt worked with Bush to approve the congressional resolution granting the president the authority to strike Iraq. Gephardt is holding firm in support of Bush's policies by breaking with other presidential candidates and endorsing the president's latest $87 billion request for Iraq and Afghanistan. As a note of caution, several GOP strategists recalled Republicans thinking Clinton would be the easiest to defeat in 1992, and Democrats eager for Ronald Reagan in 1980. They were the last two-term presidents. Researcher Lucy Shackelford contributed to this report. © 2003 The Washington Post Company

To: American Spirit who wrote (5648)	10/22/2003 4:14:20 PM
From: JakeStraw	Respond to of 10965

Kerry’s Nonsense Why did the Massachusetts senator authorize a war of whim? A big question in determining whether the Democrats can take back the White House next year is: Can the party think straight on matters of war and peace? Judging from Sen. John Kerry's performance Tuesday, the answer is "no." Let's try to follow Kerry's argument. First, he says his vote "to threaten the use of force" against Iraq last year was "right." O.K., but why? Presumably because Saddam represented a threat to the region and to U.S. interests severe enough to justify war. Otherwise, Kerry should have voted against the resolution. Indeed, the resolution said, in part, "Whereas Iraq's demonstrated capability and willingness to use weapons of mass destruction, the risk that the current Iraqi regime will either employ those weapons to launch a surprise attack against the United States or its armed forces or provide them to international terrorists who would do so, and the extreme magnitude of harm that would result to the United States and its citizens from such an attack, combine to justify action by the United States to defend itself." Kerry tries to make it seem that his vote was only to threaten force when it was to authorize it, giving congressional approval for what everyone knew was President Bush's march toward war. Just threatening the use of force, after all, would have been a continuation of what had been U.S. policy for about a decade, and utterly unremarkable. Everyone understood they were voting for a departure. Kerry is dishonest to pretend otherwise. And what good is threatening force if you're not going to use it? That's worse than not threatening it in the first place. Kerry's straddle is that he wanted to threaten war, but not actually wage it unless, in effect, France was willing to go along. This is a fine position in the abstract. Of course, it would have been better to have the entire international community behind the Iraq intervention. But what if it wasn't possible? It seems clear that France and Germany were opposed to an invasion of Iraq root and branch, and by the end of the U.S. effort to get a final U.N. resolution even Colin Powell was convinced that Paris was acting in bad faith. So the question for Kerry is whether he would have waged war in Iraq absent French approval. Probably not. Which makes it incumbent on Kerry to explain how it would have served U.S. national interests to declare Saddam a threat, to demand his compliance with U.N. resolutions, and then to back off after encountering opposition from Europeans. And why he voted to authorize the president to "use the armed forces of the United States as he determines to be necessary and appropriate in order to: (1) defend the national security of the United States against the continuing threat posed by Iraq; and (2) enforce all relevant United Nations Security Council resolutions regarding Iraq." At times, Kerry makes his opposition to the war in Iraq appear less situational — not enough allies — than categorical. He says, strongly implying that this is what Bush did in Iraq: "If I am President, the United States will never go to war because we want to, we will only go to war because we have to." In this statement — if you take it seriously — Kerry has declared his opposition to the wars in Bosnia and Kosovo in the 1990s, and the interventions in Somalia and Haiti. He seems to flirt with the argument that the U.S. historically only fights wars when it is attacked, declaring that Bush has violated "the very principles that made our nation a model to the world for over two centuries," and put us "at odds with 200 years of our history." If this is true, why did Kerry vote to authorize Bush to fight a war of whim, and a war that violated American principles? This simply makes no sense. It is understandable that Howard Dean is beating Kerry so soundly, since at least Dean has a position on the foremost public-policy issue of the last two years that is coherent and Kerry doesn't. On the postwar situation in Iraq, Kerry indulges in delusion. He says, "We need to end the sense of American occupation as fast as possible and take the targets off American soldiers." Getting more international help in Iraq does indeed make sense, and the Bush administration — perhaps belatedly — is setting about to do that. But it is wishful thinking to believe that in any circumstance terrorists and their allies aren't going to want to kill American soldiers — they did it in Beirut in 1983, they did it in Somalia in 1993, and they will continue to do it in Iraq in 2003, even if there are a couple of Indian and Turkish brigades on the ground with us. And hasn't Kerry noticed that the resistance in Iraq has gladly murdered U.N. workers and Iraqis? They hate the entire project we've embarked on in Iraq, not just the U.S. as Kerry would seem to have it. As a further sign of Bush's international recklessness, Kerry invokes the administration's interest in building a bunker-busting tactical nuclear weapon. He says that Bush "is poised to set off a new nuclear arms race," thus retailing one of the great Democratic clichés from the 1980s and the missile defense debate of the 1990s. It is an utterly meaningless phrase. What arms race is Kerry talking about? This is the situation, which has existed for a long time: The Russians are going down in nuclear missiles. The Chinese are going up in nuclear missiles. And the North Koreans are trying to build nuclear missiles. All of this is going to continue to happen whether the U.S. develops a new nuke or not. Finally, Kerry scores Bush for not using American troops in the assault on Tora Bora. Fair enough. Some of us were appalled by the endless surrender negotiations undertaken by our proxies at the time. But one of the reasons we were relying on proxies in the first place was to reduce our footprint in Afghanistan, the kind of thing Kerry generally supports — unless, apparently, it gives him a way to criticize President Bush. Kerry talks often of "arrogance" and "pride" in attacking the Bush administration; he surely is onto something. This administration does not admit mistakes easily. But Kerry (if he is the Democratic nominee) also opens himself up to a potential piece of jujitsu, the way Bob Dole did when he talked of returning to a better, past America. It seems to me Bush can — very loosely — turn Kerry's pride charge around to say that America should be proud, and has nothing to be ashamed of in defending itself vigorously. And if that doesn't work, Bush can just point out that John Kerry makes no sense.