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Politics : The American Spirit Vs. The Rightwing -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Peter Dierks who wrote (1291)	10/1/2004 9:57:57 PM
From: American Spirit	Respond to of 1904

Marine declares war on Bush Iraq war veteran Steve Brozak is running hard for Congress. And he's turning his campaign into a referendum on Bush's military folly. - - - - - - - - - - - - By Michelle Goldberg Sept. 30, 2004 \| Steve Brozak is running for Congress in New Jersey against George W. Bush. Sure, his opponent on the ticket is Republican incumbent Mike Ferguson. But as Brozak sees it, Ferguson is just a synecdoche for the Bush team, whose failings drove Brozak out of the Marines and the Republican Party and into the first political campaign of his life. "The bottom line is I'm going to take him down," Brozak says of Ferguson. "I'm just going to keep hitting at him. This is a national race because I'm going to start hitting not just him but his boss. They lied to us, they misled us about what was at stake in the war with Iraq, and they're misleading us about what is going to happen going forward." A candidate who has actually served in the Middle East during the Iraq war, Brozak has seen the quagmire up close. A dark-haired, broad-shouldered man, he has a deep, authoritative voice and enunciates crisply -- it's easy to imagine him in uniform, barking orders. When he speaks of the Bush administration, though, it's with the stunned incredulousness of one who's seen all his assumptions about the world upended. Before the war, Brozak says, he wanted to believe his president. It barely occurred to him not to. Now, his voice gets heated when he talks about Iraq, which is the subject he talks about most. "There were no weapons of mass destruction," he says. "There was no planning, just this sense of arrogance and contempt by the civilians in this administration." Running in an affluent, solidly Republican district -- one that Bush carried over Gore in 2000 -- Brozak is making this race a referendum on the president's handling of the war. Like many Democrats, he believes Iraq is so self-evidently catastrophic that it's only a matter of time before people across the political spectrum wake up and realize it. He attacks Ferguson as a "water boy" for Bush and mocks him for putting color-coded terror alerts on his Web site. The campaign between Brozak and Ferguson is almost a microcosm of the race for the presidency, as it turns largely on how people view Bush, Iraq and the war on terror. It hinges on whether others in New Jersey's District 7 have moved along the same ideological trajectory as Steve Brozak. Like John Kerry, Brozak may be able to win only if at least some of those who voted for Bush in 2000 have come to see the president as either incompetent, mendacious or both. Conservative New Jersey pollster Rick Shaftan insists that there's no way a Democrat can win the district. He says voters simply don't buy Brozak's grim view of Iraq. "People support Bush's handling of Iraq," he says. "I don't think people see it as being a screw-up. People think we did the right thing." Recent polls show Bush running competitively in New Jersey as a whole, alarming Democrats who thought they had the state locked up and leading John Edwards to make a recent campaign stop in Newark. But David Rebovich, managing director of the Institute for New Jersey Politics and chair of political science at New Jersey's Rider University, says that if Kerry can turn things around, Brozak has a real shot. "This is the closest thing to a competitive race in New Jersey this fall," he says. "Shaftan misses Brozak's attempt to locate President Bush's vulnerability on the war, on healthcare, on things like stem-cell research and exploit them through this creative, in-your-face campaign. Is this a winning strategy? I don't know. But it's a good strategy and one that might yield results." Influential Democrats have already thrown their weight behind Brozak. His campaign team, says Rebovich, "are first-class people in New Jersey." The DNC gave him a speaking slot at the convention. Former presidential candidate Wesley Clark has campaigned for him. Last week, MoveOn.org chose him as one of five antiwar congressional candidates to raise money for, and they've already collected more than $100,000 for him. Veterans of the Clark and the Howard Dean movements in New Jersey are mobilizing for him.