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: JDN who wrote (547592)	3/3/2004 10:33:17 AM
From: Hope Praytochange	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 769667

Kerry's Unreal Deal By WILLIAM SAFIRE ASHINGTON — Yogi Berra was wrong: even though it ain't over, it's over. Super Tuesday has met its Democratic Superman. John Kerry now enters Phase III of his four-phase campaign. Phase I was: "I am just as antiwar as Howard Dean, despite my vote, and I'm just as incensed at Bush's unilateralism. But I'm not a nutty newcomer, and I won't self-destruct." This message, combined with Ted Kennedy's help and the inept anti-Dean military mount chosen by the Clintonites, propelled "the new Kerry" to front-runnership. Phase II was to beat off the smooth spellbinder from the South who — had just a few thousand Iowans switched — would have taken the Big Mo into New Hampshire. Kerry did it by again absorbing his main opponent's message. John Edwards was gaining populist support by riding the railings against free trade, picking up protectionist votes by spreading fear of wild Indians in global back rooms serving U.S. stockbrokers. But the Massachusetts senator, a lifelong free trader who had warmly embraced Nafta, spun on a dime and denounced the "special interests" who were "outsourcing jobs" and "bilking our people." The strategy of the newest new Kerry culminated in yesterday's coast-to-coast sweep. By stealing the trial lawyer's summation, he clinched the Democratic nomination. Now come the harder parts. In Phase III — in the nearly five months from now to his Boston acceptance — Kerry must reach back and reveal the bedrock "old Kerry," before his tactical pre-emption of Dean's pacifism and Edwards's protectionism. I remember conversations in Davos over the years with a serious, low-key senator whose thoughtful mien and earnest deliberation belied his down-the-line lefty voting record. I found Kerry to be a nice stiff, not a rigid stiff, who wears and worries well. In the current phase, with the nomination in his pocket, he can stop emulating Dean's anger and copying Edwards's dual-Americanism. (Where will the Deaniacs and the trial lawyers go — to Nader? No; they will swallow the old Kerry — perhaps the real Kerry — to beat Bush.) That means he will have to cut the adopted negativist rhetoric of the early phases, like last week's "heartbreaking reminder of the millions of Americans without work" whose "mainstream values are scorned by a White House that puts privilege first." Such red meat tastes great to the already convinced, but will come across as hot air to independents who decide close general elections — a group where Kerry is weakest. Their eyeballs also roll heavenward when a politician who voted to welcome China into the World Trade Organization waggles a finger at election time to warn the Chinese leaders that "they will feel the full force of our trade laws" if they don't adjust the value of their currency. Kerry began to back away from the protectionist pitch last week, when editorialists began to hold their noses at echoes of the Smoot-Hawley trade barriers that preceded the Depression. In Toledo, Ohio, after taking the usual pop at strawmen who say "everything will be fine if only we have more tax cuts for the wealthy," Kerry dared to add a shot at Edwards: "or if we cut off trade with the rest of the world." Some of us hoped that he would get substantive at a nonstump speech at the U.C.L.A. Center for International Relations. But it was an unworthy hodgepodge; if Bush had given such a speech, it would have been widely panned as thin, political, gimmicky and naïve. Apparently Kerry's advisers are worried about a too timely capture of Osama bin Laden, thus: "This war isn't just a manhunt." He anticipates criticism for relying too much on the U.N.: "As president, I will not wait for a green light from abroad when our safety is at stake." And he has a simplistic, Mr. Fixit solution to terror weapons: "I propose to appoint a high-level presidential envoy empowered to bring other nations together to secure and stop the spread of these weapons." That'll solve it. Phase III demands much more serious thinking, enabling voters to compare worldviews and economic plans. That will lay the basis for Phase IV: the September-October debates, and the candidates' reactions to crises and job trends. That will determine if Kerry's ideas are as relevant as those laid out in detail by Bush.

To: JDN who wrote (547592)	3/3/2004 10:46:24 AM
From: CYBERKEN	Respond to of 769667

<<The media is saying this is going to be the longest, nastiest campaign in America political history.>> I like that idea. It chases the pitiful Bobdole's Disease victims out of the process of conferring power-where their incompetence has done so much DAMAGE to America over the decades. Or, as Pietro Clemenza said in "The Godfather", "It scares away any pain-in-the-ass 'innocent bystanders'."...

To: JDN who wrote (547592)	3/3/2004 10:50:35 AM
From: CYBERKEN	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 769667

Attacking "the waffling" is the tactical error that killed the Bobdole's Disease Republicans in the 90's. The public doesn't relate to such Beltway Babble, and it always looks like an excuse to wimp out of an argument (which is exactly what it is.) Kerry is a traitor and a class-hating Marxist. Spotlight THAT, or you give him a chance to damage the America he hates. It's what RONALDVS MAGNVS would do...