Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Politics : PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: American Spirit who wrote (484591)	10/31/2003 3:00:49 PM
From: JakeStraw	Respond to of 769670

>>Bush must create millions of new jobs or else. Says who? You?!

To: American Spirit who wrote (484591)	11/1/2003 2:01:32 PM
From: Hope Praytochange	Respond to of 769670

Message 19456201

To: American Spirit who wrote (484591)	11/1/2003 2:03:37 PM
From: Hope Praytochange	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 769670

For Democrats, Economy's Surge Poses Challenge By DAVID LEONHARDT ........... But with the economy having surged this past quarter they are suddenly confronting the possibility of a far less encouraging historical comparison: that the election year economy could be more like the one Ronald Reagan ran on in 1984, when the country was coming out of a long slump. The rapid change in the outlook — underscored by figures released on Thursday showing the fastest quarterly economic growth since 1984 — is already forcing the Democratic presidential candidates to calibrate their attack on Mr. Bush's economic record in ways they did not have to just a week ago. It has also left them in danger of looking as though they are clinging to economic gloom. Rather than simply decrying the economy's condition, the Democrats now say that one quarter of growth does not erase three years of sluggishness. The growth has not caused a rebound in the job market, they note, and large budget deficits loom for years. "For there to be a genuine recovery, it's got to happen in more than economic statistics," Senator Joseph I. Lieberman, Democrat of Connecticut, and a presidential candidate, said on Thursday in Buffalo. "It's got to happen in the lives of America's middle class and those working hard to get into it." nytimes.com

To: American Spirit who wrote (484591)	11/1/2003 2:24:46 PM
From: Hope Praytochange	Respond to of 769670

Gephardt Beats Clinton By DAVID BROOKS ick Gephardt strides into a family restaurant in Pocahontas, Iowa, and finds two species of mammals waiting for his campaign event, Iowans and reporters. The 24 Iowans in this small room are unpretentious Midwesterners. There are farmers in dirty work coats. There are women in floral sweaters with gray hair, for they are as likely to color their hair as they are to sprout wings and fly to Mars. The Iowans are almost all elderly. (If you judged by the crowds at Iowa campaign events, you'd think the voting age was 70.) The 23 reporters are from New York, Washington, London and such places, and are fully gadgeted up. We have phones, pagers, P.D.A.'s and various digital devices. We are 1,000 percent more likely than the Iowans to have college degrees, 10,000 percent more likely to think Jon Stewart is funny, and an infinite percent more likely to know what the words "Manolo Blahnik" refer to. Dick Gephardt has brought the two groups together, but he is more one of them than one of us. He's from St. Louis, a city that has lost well over half of its population in his lifetime, and has spent his career as a party leader fighting for the Midwestern farmers and factory workers who have been on the losing side of economic history. With reporters he is notoriously aloof and miserable, but you stick him in front of a bunch of retired union guys, and he radiates passion and sincerity. His stump speech, which he hasn't altered since the start of the campaign, doesn't include anything on social issues or gun control. Instead, it's an unfurling of government programs: a drug program, a farm program, an energy program and so on. Like his hero Harry Truman, you can't get much more bread-and-butter than Dick Gephardt. I judge these speeches by wheeling out the nod-o-meter. When a politician says something that directly touches the experiences and convictions of voters, you begin to see heads bobbing up and down in the audience. Gephardt gets the heads bobbing when he tells the story of his son's nearly fatal bout with cancer and concludes, "People with health insurance get better treatment than people without." But the issue that Gephardt is most passionate about, which gets the heads bobbing most vociferously, is trade. At the climax of his speech, Gephardt describes his visits to factory towns in Mexico and China, where he saw factory workers living in shipping boxes with raw sewage running through the streets. He describes his meeting with Bill Clinton at which he told the president he would not support Nafta unless there were international standards built in. He ridicules his Democratic opponents for their primary-season conversions on the issue. Sure, they are against free-trade pacts now, he points out, "but I was there when the jobs were on the line!" Heads are bobbing all around. The fact is, he's won. For three decades the Democrats have been split on trade, but you'd never know it from this campaign. Just as the Democratic field is chasing Howard Dean on Iraq, it is chasing Dick Gephardt on trade — and repudiating Clinton. It is impossible to imagine the next Democratic presidential candidate pushing free-trade deals the way the last one did. How has this shift happened? George Bush has played a role. Opposition to his policies has mobilized the liberals and quieted the Democratic centrists, pushing the party left on a number of issues. The unions have played a role. Under revitalized leadership, they've increased their influence on the party, if not the country. But Gephardt has been crucial. If he had abandoned his position when the New Democrats were in vogue, or when Al Gore was crushing Ross Perot in debate, the protectionist side of the arguments would have collapsed. Moreover, he's made his trade position politically palatable. He used to project himself as an economic nationalist — as the protector of American jobs against those low-wage foreigners. Now he presents himself as a global liberal, insisting on international environmental and worker standards before trade deals are signed. The policy results are the same — more trade barriers — but now it sounds more humane. Put aside the merits of Gephardt's case — and personally I think free trade helps many more people than it hurts. Here is an unglamorous man who, after a lifetime's slogging, has brought his party around to his point of view. That's sort of impressive.

To: American Spirit who wrote (484591)	11/1/2003 2:36:12 PM
From: Hope Praytochange	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 769670

Democrats, however, are virtually invisible as an effective opposition to a president who commands center stage. Even many loyal Democrats complain that their party has no strong leaders and no alternative vision to Bush on either foreign or economic policy. The nine Democratic presidential candidates have made almost no impression on voters outside the few states with early caucuses or primaries next year. Most voters cannot name more than one or two of the candidates. While there is concern about the state of the country and dissatisfaction with the absence of compromise in Washington, nationally there is little evidence of the voter anger that helped defeat Bush's father in 1992 and elect a Republican Congress in 1994. Nor is there any sign that the discontent that ended Democratic Gov. Gray Davis's tenure in California in the recall election there last month has become a national phenomenon. washingtonpost.com