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Politics : Proof that John Kerry is Unfit for Command -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: mistermj who wrote (8251)	9/7/2004 10:37:51 AM
From: Andrew N. Cothran	Respond to of 27181

ENTERING THE HOMESTRETCH: With the exception of the poor, hurricane-battered folks in Florida, the rest of the country is waking up today after a nice, long, holiday weekend refreshed and ready to get back to work - and down to the business of electing a new president. Let's just say it's going to be an intersting fifty-six days. For those who haven't been checking in over the weekend, three polls have been released since Friday afternoon giving President Bush a healthy 6.4-point lead in our three way RCP Average. Incidentally, there has been a lot of talk about oversampling of Republicans in both the Time and Newsweek polls. Furthermore, Gallup, the most respected of all major polling firms, gives Bush a 7-point lead among likely voters but only a 1-point lead among registered voters. Despite all the spin being put on the horserace numbers, the more important (and much less talked about) numbers in these polls were the President's job approval rating: 55% in the Time poll, 52% in Newsweek and 52% in Gallup. Very little discrepancy across the board. Should Bush's job approval rating stay in this range through November 2 it will be more than enough to win him reelection. Needless to say, the Bush bounce has unnerved many Democrats and added a whiff of desperation to the Kerry campaign. Actually, the desperation started last Thursday about thirty minutes after the President's acceptance speech when John Kerry "climbed out of his political coffin" at midnight to deliver a stinging, though supremely ungracious, rebuttal to Bush. Not pretty. Not Presidential. Then over the weekend Kerry shook up - excuse me, "made some additions to" - his staff and emerged yesterday with a new position on Iraq, calling it "the wrong war in the wrong place at the wrong time." On a different (and much uglier) note we're now also being treated to Kitty Kelly's hit job on the First Family which includes all manner of slanderous accusations. Like Fahrenheit 9/11, this book will be ignored by 80+ per cent of the population as baseless propaganda but will be ingested by Bush-hating partisans everywhere as gleefully and rapidly as a bunch of homeless crack addicts sitting in the alley passing the pipe around the burning trash bin. No doubt there will be much more ugliness to come in the next two months. LOSING TO THE 800-LB GORILLA: One of the reasons this campaign is going to get even uglier is because John Kerry is currently sitting in a pretty tight box right now. Early on the Kerry campaign made the (correct) strategic assessment that that national security was the 800-lb gorilla of this election - one they couldn't go around but had to try and deal with. The problem, of course, is that given Kerry's record on national security in the United States Senate, the only thing the campaign could use to address the issue was Kerry's service in Vietnam thirty-five years ago. The result is that we now have one candidate running a campaign based on issues and another running a campaign based on a four -month piece of his biography when he was twenty-five years old. This has led to the bizarre, disjointed dialogue we've seen in the past few months which has gone something like this: Bush: "After 9/11 national security is a paramount concern to our republic.We must take the fight to the terrorists where they are and not wait to be forced to fight them at home." Kerry: "I served two tours of duty in Vietnam." Cheney: "Senator Kerry's 20-year voting record shows poor national security judgment." Kerry: "Stop questioning my patriotism." Yesterday the NY Times reported that Bill Clinton advised Kerry to stop talking about Vietnam. It may be too late. The 800-lb national security gorilla is still sitting there in the middle of the room, and despite Kerry's best effort to use his four months of active duty in Vietnam as a weapon to vanquish it, Kerry has made little (if any) progress in getting through the issue and convincing voters he's up to the task. - T. Bevan 8:45 Tuesday, September 7, 2004: realclearpolitics.com