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Politics : PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: JBTFD who wrote (647014)	10/18/2004 3:12:16 PM
From: Hope Praytochange	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 769669

nytimes.com E-mail: safire@nytimes.com The Lowest Blow By WILLIAM SAFIRE ashington The memoir about the Kerry-Edwards campaign that will be the best seller will reveal the debate rehearsal aimed at focusing national attention on the fact that Vice President Cheney has a daughter who is a lesbian. That this twice-delivered low blow was deliberate is indisputable. The first shot was taken by John Edwards, seizing a moderator's opening to smarmily compliment the Cheneys for loving their openly gay daughter, Mary. The vice president thanked him and yielded the remaining 80 seconds of his time; obviously it was not a diversion he was willing to prolong. Until that moment, only political junkies knew that a member of the Cheney family serving on the campaign staff was homosexual. The vice president, to show it was no secret or anything his family was ashamed of, had referred to it briefly twice this year, but the press - respecting family privacy - had properly not made it a big deal. The percentage of voters aware of Mary Cheney's sexual orientation was tiny. But Edwards's answer in the vice-presidential debate raised that percentage. Because Cheney refused to react and the media did not see the spotlight on lesbianism as part of a political plan, the opening shot worked. Emboldened, members of Kerry's debate preparation team made Mary Cheney's private life the centerpiece of their answer to the question, especially worrisome to them, about same-sex marriage. Kerry was prepped to insert her sexuality into his rehearsed answer: "If you were to talk to Dick Cheney's daughter, who is a lesbian. ..." But in this second time around, the gratuitous insertion of Cheney's daughter into an answer slipping around a hot-button social issue revealed that it was part of a deliberate Kerry campaign strategy. One purpose was to drive a wedge between the Republican running mates. President Bush supports a constitutional amendment limiting marriage to a union of a man and a woman; Cheney has long been on record favoring state option, but always adds that the president sets administration policy. That rare divergence of views is hardly embarrassing. The sleazier purpose of the Kerry-Edwards spotlight on Mary Cheney is to confuse and dismay Bush supporters who believe that same-sex marriage is wrong, to suggest that Bush is as "soft on same-sex" as Kerry is, and thereby to reduce a Bush core constituency's eagerness to go to the polls. The pro-Kerry columnist Margaret Carlson put her finger on it, finding that Kerry and Edwards "realize that discussing Mary Cheney is a no-lose proposition: It highlights the hypocrisy of the Bush-Cheney position to Democrats while simultaneously alerting evangelicals to the fact that the Cheneys have an actual gay person in their household whom they apparently aren't trying to convert or cure." (Italics mine.) After the outspoken Lynne Cheney blasted this unsought intrusion of her daughter's private life as "a cheap and tawdry trick," the Kerry campaign hustled forward John Edwards's wife to charge that such motherly outrage "indicates a certain degree of shame with respect to her daughter's sexual preferences." Worse than insensitive, that shot was off message, peeling the veneer off the Kerry-Edwards justification for making Mary famous: their oleaginous claim that, gee, they were only complimenting Dick Cheney for his fatherly tolerance. The crusher to that pretense came when the Kerry campaign manager, Mary Beth Cahill, coolly announced that the Cheney daughter was "fair game." Apparently the American public thinks otherwise about the campaigning children of candidates. When polls showed two-to-one disapproval of the calculated Kerry-Edwards abuse of the young woman's privacy, the Democratic strategists who concocted this base-suppressing dirty trick orchestrated a defense that it was Dick Cheney who "outed" his daughter months ago. They are advising Kerry that he would look weak or, worse, slyly manipulative were he to apologize for tagging the Cheneys with the word "lesbian" before 50 million viewers. Kerry will, I hope, assert his essential decency by apologizing with sincerity. Other Republicans hope he will let his self-inflicted wound fester. They have in mind a TV spot using an old film clip of a Boston lawyer named Welch at a Congressional hearing, saying "Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?" E-mail: safire@nytimes.com

To: JBTFD who wrote (647014)	10/19/2004 2:32:32 PM
From: Hope Praytochange	Respond to of 769669

truthbuster - 2:14 PM ET October 19, 2004 (#36729 of 36764) When you see rhetorical smoke billowing up from the Democrats, well ladies and gentlemen, I'd follow the example of their hero; don't inhale More Left Wing Lies The vice presidential debate was quickly followed by the usual fascination with style ("Nice Guy vs. The Ice Guy," said USA Today) and the equally customary lack of interest in facts. A glaring example was Sen. Edwards' startling comment that "Half of African-Americans are dropping out of high school. Half of Hispanic-Americans are dropping out of high school." That may have been an effective debating point, but doesn't anyone care if it's true? If untrue, it seems to me a nasty slur on black and Hispanic parents who supposedly let their kids drop out. Searching Goggle, LexisNexis and Factiva the following day, I could not find a single news source questioning this dropout claim. One AP story quoted Alice Theis of Leavenworth, Kansas, who "was impressed with the facts or the figures that Edwards ... threw out with the school dropouts." Another AP story quoted Frisco Rose, a student at North Carolina State. But the figures Edwards threw out needed to be thrown out. Childrensdatabank.org reports that, "In 2002, 7 percent of non-Hispanic whites were not enrolled in school and had not completed high school, whereas 12 percent of blacks and 26 percent of Hispanics had dropped out." The latter figure does (SET ITAL) not (END ITAL) mean 26 percent of Hispanics are "dropping out" of U.S. schools. "The high rate for Hispanics is in part the result of the high proportion of immigrants in this age group who never attended schools in the U.S." Even as recently as 1980, the numbers of young people who had not completed high school was above 11 percent for whites, 19 percent for blacks and 35 percent for Hispanics. As in the case of jobs and incomes, things that are getting better are being described as getting worse. I have no idea where Edwards got the idea that half the black and Hispanic kids "are dropping out of high school," but such wanton carelessness says something about his credulity and credibility. It also says something about the U.S. media that few reporters, if any, questioned even such an extreme remark. forums.nytimes.com