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Politics : John EDWARDS for President -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: JakeStraw who wrote (789)	2/26/2004 1:24:06 PM
From: Ann Corrigan	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1381

Thanks, JS. Too bad USA Today didn't start before this reporting the facts on Kerry. Edwards would be much easier to listen to for 4yrs: Posted 2/25/2004 10:31 PM Updated 2/26/2004 12:41 AM Kerry: Can be a good listener but a bad speaker By Jill Lawrence, USA TODAY CLEVELAND — John Kerry practices politics as a contact sport. As he campaigns for the Democratic presidential nomination, he envelops supporters in hugs, drapes his arms across countless sets of shoulders. Still, no one would ever mistake Kerry for political comfort food. He is tall, thin and angular. His features droop, and when he takes the microphone you never know whether his language will be windy or pointed. All of Kerry's strengths and weaknesses are on display — sometimes within minutes of each other — in this week leading up to Super Tuesday, the 10 primaries and caucuses on March 2. The rip-roaring finale was exciting. Minutes earlier, however, Kerry had unleashed some of the longest and most bewildering sentences ever heard at a campaign rally. One had at least 10 clauses before he finally arrived at what sounded like a full stop. The Senate, where Kerry has spent 19 years, doesn't limit speaking time. He has been trying with some success to break his habit of talking at length in convoluted sentences. His communication skills peaked in Iowa last month, when his presidential hopes appeared doomed. He saved himself by listening patiently to voters for hours on end and answering every question they asked. Some backsliding has occurred since then. Kerry's victory speech last week in Wisconsin was ponderous. Aides say Kerry lapses when he's tired or sick, and he was both that night. Kerry's wealthy Ivy League background sometimes meshes uneasily with his attempts to relate to what rival John Edwards calls "regular people." When he talked to steelworkers Wednesday in Cleveland, he wore a brown barn jacket — over a dark suit and pink silk tie. Months ago, in a sports bar in Waterloo, Iowa, he told a young man who waited tables for a living that his daughter was waitressing while studying acting in New York City. It wasn't quite the same thing. Edwards, a first-term North Carolina senator, has turned the race into a compassion contest between the aristocratic Kerry and himself, the son of a textile millworker. But Kerry appears to be holding his own. This week, on a multistate tour through areas hit by manufacturing shutdowns, Kerry has quizzed a jobless plumber about his child care arrangements, sympathized with a diabetic who can't afford his medication and discussed trade with steelworkers in a threatened industry. "If you lost this job," Kerry asked the steelworkers, "how many of you have thought about what you would do?" In suit pants, button-down shirt and tie, Kerry cut an awkward figure facing about 100 workers in T-shirts, sweatshirts and jeans this week at Astro Shapes, an aluminum extrusion plant in Struthers, Ohio. His voice sounded loud and formal over the microphone, more suited to a speech than the conversation he said he wanted to have. His answers to questions were so long that few people got to ask anything. But the workers listened closely as he described plans to cut health care costs, review all trade agreements, and halve the federal budget deficit in four years. Later, they called him sincere; some said he won their vote. Kerry's bottom line: "I'm going to be who I am. What people don't like is inauthenticity." ************************************************ He finally got something right--moderates, who determine election outcomes, will not vote for Kerry because he is inauthentic. An incubated wealthy life, coddled by heiress wives, does not make for a real person...only a plastic version.