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 : Politics for Pros- moderated -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: LindyBill who wrote (66521)	9/2/2004 4:27:24 PM
From: LindyBill	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 793964

Undecided Veterans may be key to win in November Posted by McQ Why is the veteran vote so important in this election? Well there are 25+ million vets in the US, so its a pretty formidable voting bloc. Per American Legion magazine (no link), the 2000 Census showed 26.4 million vets lived in the US and about 84% were registered to vote. About 24.8 million were men and 1.6 million women. 82.9 percent are white and 9.7 percent are black. 31.7 percent are Vietnam War vets and 21.7 are WW II veterans. While they're distributed throughout the conuntry, there are higher distributions in the South and Midwest. They really do present a diverse cross section of America, and although they all share the honor and distinction of being veterans they aren't necessarily like minded in voting. The reason, perhaps is they don't see themselves solely as vets. While that's one issue with which they're concerned, it does't usually outweigh all others. Until maybe this election: Eugene Holloway of Alabama is the kind of voter that President Bush and Sen. John Kerry vie for. "Right up until today I was undecided," he said. "Now I know who I'm going to vote for — Bush." Who's Eugene Holloway? Well he's a delegate to the American Legion convention in Nashville, TN, and the quote was given right after Kerry had spoken. Now many are going to see that Holloway is from Alabama and correctly point out that Alabama is going to go for Bush anyway, and that's probably true. But to dismiss what Holloway says is to miss the larger point. There are undecideds among a very large veteran population, and because of a present war and a past war, it is very possible that among vets the issue of being a veteran may loom large indeed when it comes down to pulling the lever in the voting booth. Additionally the comments from other delegates at that convention are just as important to understand as they pertain to this voting bloc. A few samples: "He was up there taking credit for everything the American Legion had achieved. He was talking about 'we' and 'I,' " said Ed Reiter of Long Island, who emphasized he was speaking for himself — not his delegation. Reiter's not buying Kerry's claims that while in the Senate he was the guy responsible for the veterans benefits that came along. Reiter knows where they came from ... veterans organizations, not follow-the-leader legislators like John Kerry. And it incenses him that Kerry's now trying to take credit with lofty lines like: "After returning from Vietnam, I saw vets who weren't getting the care they needed, so we fought hard and got additional funding for VA hospitals. "We founded the first medical-assistance programs in the country . . . We stood with veterans by getting the GI Bill extended." Reiter correctly refuses to give him credit as Kerry did little if any of the grunt work nor did Kerry write the legislation. The Legion, VFW and DAV were the ones that got it done. If Kerry did anything it was to cast a vote of one among many. That's not all that's perking in the veteran pot. Vietnam still looms large. Michael Martin, a Viet vet from Nashville, said, "Today would have been a great time for him to apologize to his comrades after his comments in 1971 and then release his war records. Maybe all could've been forgiven. And I'm a Democrat." But he didn't and it wasn't. How tough was it for Kerry? Nicholas Kleszczewski, a Manhattan actuary and commander of New York County American Legion, said: "I am a Democrat, too. Now you can't be too harsh on Kerry. He said all the right things. He knew he was in the lion's den." And Andrew Wahl, of Cooperstown, N.Y., believes "Kerry told the truth." But for everyone like these guys there were probably 5 who looked at it this way: But Bob Voll, of Delaware, noted, "There he was talking up there about getting more money for body armor and Humvees for the troops in Iraq. "When more money was requested he voted against it." The two records Kerry want's to ignore (or at least present in a positive way) are now seeing light. And what the light reveals, at least by this sampling, isn't good news for Kerry. In Kerry's 1971 anti-war book, "The New Soldier", he wrote this: We will not quickly join those who march on Veterans' Day waving small flags, calling to memory those thousands who died for the "greater glory of the United States." We will not accept the rhetoric. We will not readily join the American Legion and the Veterans of Foreign Wars-in fact, we will find it hard to join anything at all and when we do, we will demand relevancy such as other organizations have recently been unable to provide. We will not take solace from the creation of monuments or the naming of parks after a select few of the thousands of dead Americans and Vietnamese. We will not uphold traditions which decorously memorialize that which was base and grim. [emphasis mine] This is what he had a chance to fix. This is what he needed to address. These are the guys who've been fighting for veteran's benefits since the turn of the century. Kerry called them irrelevant. Old vets may not die and instead fade away, but until they do, they have very long memories. It may come to pass that the veterans of these organizations and the veteran bloc in total could be the ones who finally make John Kerry irrelevant and see him disappear from the national scene. That'd work just fine for me.