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

To: LindyBill who wrote (82483)	11/1/2004 3:01:21 PM
From: LindyBill	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 793866

Kerry Spot [ jim geraghty reporting ] REPORT FROM HAWAII [11/01 02:37 PM] Kerry Spot reader Williams tells us how things are going in the Aloha state: The President has a real shot at the four votes now. The VP's trip here last night was a smash. 9000 [FROM JIM: I understand the Bush campaign is saying 11,000] showed up for the rally when Cheney didn't speak until after 11:00 p.m., and which Cheney's entourage said was his biggest rally of the campaign... The crowd started arriving at 8:30, and no one left until the VP was done. Because his appearance was after 11:00 pm, it didn't get any late night news coverage, but all four stations did lead their broadcast with their reporters at the scene, showing the raucous crowd inside the conventional hall waiting for the VP to arrive. They also had reporters out at Hickam AFB awaiting the VP's plane. I'm sure footage shot last night ran this morning on the early morning news broadcasts. The key will be if the stations run the footage of the appearance again tonight — given the closeness of the election and the interest in Hawaii, I'm confident that they will... So, Gore gets 1,200 at a pro-Kerry/pro-Abercrombie rally, and the VP gets 9,000. One thing that may help is that Gov. Lingle — first Republican Gov. in 40 years here, and currently sporting a 64% approval rating — for the last 2 weeks has been running generic "Vote GOP" ads in her effort to win seats for the GOP in the legislature. This ad campaign may generate more grassroots movement for the GOP across the state, and may convince some iffy Dem voters who support her to vote GOP. Given the small margin of victory that is likely to result here (I'm guessing less than 5,000 one way or the other), even a small generic campaign such as that might make a difference. Here's how nervous the Kerry campaign is here. They spent $200,000 on paid advertising over the weekend; Alexandra Kerry stayed here 3 days attending various events; Edwards did telephone interviews with the newspapers yesterday, and Clinton did satellite interviews with the TV stations. Other than Edwards getting some mention in the newspapers this morning, the rest seems to not have registered much. I am also informed that the state GOP is aiming its get-out-the-vote efforts to begin as early in the day as possible, to minimize influence from any coverage of the states in the Eastern Time Zone. KERRY TEAM LOSING HOPE IN OHIO? [11/01 02:17 PM] Over in the Corner, Rich notices this item in the Note: The three [Wall Street Journal’s Rogers, Hitt, and Harwood] also write that “Bush advisers noted late movement toward the Republican ticket in Ohio; one senior Kerry adviser, after days in which the campaign had been especially bullish on the state, predicted Florida’s 27 electoral votes might be easier to grab than Ohio’s 20.” But they get Rep. Rob Portman to admit that "We are allowing Sen. Kerry to paint us into a corner I'm afraid people are believing" Kerry's attacks on the President over outsourcing. There are Bush advisers more bullish on Ohio than Florida (and vice versa) and Kerry advisers more bullish on Ohio than Florida (and vice versa). Ready for real irony? I talked a little while back with a good friend working on a key Democratic Senate campaign. This friend made comments similar to Portman, but from the Democratic perspective about that state’s race - “we’re being painted into a corner, we’re on defense, we’re talking about the issues the GOP wants us to, gay marriage, abortion, etc.” LAWYERS MIGHT NOT MATTER AFTER ALL? [11/01 02:07 PM] From Michael Barone: As the campaign races to the end, with George W. Bush holding a slight lead over John Kerry in most polls, it is interesting to go back and see how much of the political conventional wisdom (you read some of it in this space) has proved to be wrong... [Conventional Wisdom:] This election will be resolved by lawsuits. OK, the fact is that I don't know yet whether this will turn out to be true. It certainly could. But consider this about the 2000 Florida controversy: All the lawyering succeeded in moving only a few hundreds of votes. The problem was that after the first count only about 1,200 votes separated the candidates. The Gore campaign could not find a way to challenge Bush's 7,211-vote margin in New Hampshire, whose four electoral votes would have given Gore the election. It's very rare for a decisive state to be as close as Florida. This time, Democrats seem to be preparing to argue that challenged provisional ballots would wipe away Bush margins considerably larger than Florida's. But it's not clear that this will produce prolonged litigation.