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Politics : Discuss the candidates honestly. -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Andrew N. Cothran who wrote (3115)	7/30/2004 6:43:52 PM
From: Andrew N. Cothran	Respond to of 4965

Convention Rapid Response Team Boston, Day Four. Dan Casey The face of the Kerry campaign received a large injection of rhetorical botox tonight as the extreme makeover finished up. The six-hundred-million-dollar man (pre-nup notwithstanding) now contains a straighten spine of Cheneyum, replacing a spine of Kofianium formerly bent in supplication to the United Nations. ("We can rebuild him....") Okay, I can't go on like this. Kerry will get his bounce. The Speech accomplished the basics and more. His war service, heroism, the flag, and call for a larger military positions him (to the average undecided voter tuning in) as a strong patriot and a strong leader. Commander-in-chief material. That's gotta be worth a few points. It will take a sustained attack on Kerry's liberal 20-year defense voting record to bring his public image more in line with reality. By my calculations, his 5,221-word speech (thank you, Mr. Drudge) contained exactly 71 words about his 20-year Senate career. That is the dog that didn't bark tonight. RNC chief Ed Gillespie has that 20-year record memorized and that dog barks and bites. Kerry also used The Speech to try and steal away from Republicans the "values" issue just as Republican-strategist extraordinaire Jeff Bell had predicted. The domestic-policy "initiatives" (if they can be called that) were mostly the usual Democrat bread and butter stuff. Nothing too interesting there. I guess we must wait for the unveiling of his "middle-class tax cut." Shades of 1992! Although the average voter had no idea what he was referring to, Kerry's "let's never misuse for political purposes the most precious document in American history, the Constitution of the United States" was directed to gay-marriage supporters. He was signaling how he intends to oppose the very popular Federal Marriage Amendment, while also opposing same sex marriage. A classic Kerry straddle on an issue not mentioned once during prime time at the convention but a potential sleeper issue of the campaign. On to New York. July 30, 2004

To: Andrew N. Cothran who wrote (3115)	7/30/2004 8:52:39 PM
From: American Spirit	Respond to of 4965

Republicans Defect to Kerry's Camp Fri Jul 30,12:23 PM ET Add Politics - Reuters to My Yahoo! By Michael Conlon CHICAGO (Reuters) - Ohio resident Bob Stewart says of President Bush (news - web sites): "He's been a world-class polarizer. I don't know if I can stomach four more years with him as president. He misled us into the war in Iraq (news - web sites) and has mismanaged everything since." A raging Democrat? No, Stewart is a Republican, one of an unknown number of such voters who plan to back John Kerry (news - web sites), out of despair over the war in Iraq and disappointment over budget deficits and social policies. It remains to be seen whether they can tip the scales in hotly contested middle American states like Ohio as the Democratic nominee courts them and battles Bush in the final three-month dash to November's election. In past elections defections from both parties have sometimes canceled each other out. Kerry and running mate John Edwards (news - web sites) kicked off that fight on Friday, leaving Boston and the concluded party convention for a two-week campaign swing across 21 states. Stewart, 44, an insurance agent from Anderson Township near Cincinnati, voted for Bush in 2000 and is a registered Republican. "I just have a gut feeling that Kerry can be trusted to make the right courageous decisions and will make a good president. He showed that with his heroism in Vietnam," he says. Bush is "supposed to be a conservative and yet he's run up the biggest federal deficit in history. One thing that really turned me (away from Bush) as a lifelong Catholic ... was to see Bush go to the Vatican (news - web sites) and try to get the pope to come down hard on Kerry for his stand on abortion. That is absolutely appalling." In Michigan, Dan Martin has run for local office as a Republican. He says his biggest disappointment is that Bush's reputation as a "compassionate, conservative" governor of Texas hasn't proven true in the White House. "The foreign policy is a mess. The offensive in Iraq is reckless and built on bad decision making. On the domestic front I understand that terrorism has struck and he's occupied but any real progress on a domestic agenda has ground to a halt," added Martin, 32, a customer service manager at a health maintenance organization who lives in Rochester Hills. In Tennessee, Brian Boland, a young music company manager shopping at a market near Nashville, said: "I've always voted Republican and my folks will just kill me if they find out I'm switching to Kerry this year ... but I am just frustrated with the way Bush has mishandled everything. All the untruths." His wife said she too was switching. The Republicans carried Tennessee in 2000, even though it was the home state of Democratic nominee Al Gore (news - web sites). At the same market Ron King, a black Vietnam Veteran, said: "I always voted Republican before but I'm against Bush ever since I found out that he doesn't love this country. His so-called military record is a sham. And the worst part is that he lies so much. He lied about weapons of mass destruction." Lloyd Huff, 64, retired director of the Dayton Research Institute in Ohio, says he has "voted for a Republican in every presidential election I can remember" but it will be Kerry this time because "the Bush administration has been the most deceitful, duplicitous, secretive administration this country has ever had." "Going to war in Iraq was a horrible, horrible mistake," he said. He accused Bush of "an arrogant, swaggering cowboy mentality ... he has done more than anyone to inflame the Muslim world by his words and actions," Kenneth Warren of St. Louis University, who has studied and taught about voter behavior for three decades, said turning a trickle into a trend will be a tough job for Kerry because historically Republicans tend to be faithful. Democrats are more diverse and divided, a "party of factions," and more easily hived off, as former President Ronald Reagan (news - web sites) did with the "Reagan Democrats," he said. Clay Richards, assistant director of the Polling Institute at Quinnipiac University in Connecticut, says Kerry is getting about 11 or 12 percent of the Republican vote in Pennsylvania and New Jersey while Bush is drawing 9 or 10 percent of his support from Democrats, not a statistically significant crossover. Before any Kerry draw could be rated similar to the "Reagan Democrats" effect, he said "the gap would have to be a lot bigger."