Fallout from Operation Clark County?
Reactions to Dubya's re-election:
Voters who cited moral issues as most important did give their votes overwhelmingly to Bush....But these differences were no greater in 2004 than in 2000. If you're trying to explain why the president's vote share in 2004 is bigger than his vote share in 2000, values don't help.
Slate's final election scorecard (1st Nov.)
After the three debates in the past fortnight salvaged John F. Kerry's presidential candidacy, it has become clear to tacticians in both parties that the Democrat, to borrow President Bush's famous phrase from the 2000 campaign, was misunderestimated.
After an awful start, I thought Kerry and Bush got stronger as the evening wore on. But Kerry got much stronger -- his criticisms of Bush got sharper over time. Bush stuck to the message, stuck to his message, and stuck to his message. I'll be curious to see how the ratings look -- whether people stuck with the debate for the entire evening. If they tuned in early but then tuned out, Kerry is in trouble. If people came in halfway through, Kerry gets a boost. The other key is which clips the media uses in their recaps.
The Lone Star Iconoclast, the newspaper in George Bush's home town, shook the small settlement of Crawford, Texas, yesterday by turning against its most famous resident and endorsing John Kerry. The decision has not made W Leon Smith, the Iconoclast's publisher and editor-in-chief, very popular among Crawford's 705-strong population, a mainly conservative crowd who hope a second Bush term will invigorate the sleepy local economy.
Text of Bush's speech to the Republican convention (from the Washington Post)
Just 40 minutes after President Bush completed his acceptance speech in New York, Kerry -- in his sharpest and most personal remarks yet -- called Bush "unfit" to lead, saying he misled the country on the Iraq war and citing his failed record on jobs, health care and energy costs.
Almost all the prime time speakers in Madison Square Garden, with the president and vice-president as two of the rare exceptions, will be moderates whose views on fundamental social issues are at odds with the overwhelming majority of delegates and with the party platform being put together behind the scenes.
Given that only two black senators have ever been elected by popular vote, an all-black Senate race in a state that is 73% white is a significant moment. The fact that it should happen in Illinois, which markets itself as the Land of Lincoln, home of the American president credited with freeing the slaves, is greeted with a mixture of pride and feigned indifference.
Mr. Bush's comments, in a half-hour interview with The New York Times, undercut a central accusation leveled by the veterans group, Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, whose unproven attacks on Mr. Kerry have dominated the political debate for more than two weeks.
In the interview, which included topics like preparations for the Republican National Convention, the reconstruction of Iraq and the twin nuclear threats of North Korea and Iran, Mr. Bush portrayed himself as a victim of the same type of political interest groups - called 527 committees for the section of the tax code that created them - that are attacking Mr. Kerry.
Kerry's return to economic and health care issues is timed for the impending release of Census Bureau statistics that are expected to show a rise in poverty and an increase in the number of Americans without health insurance. "This administration has weakened our middle class, weakened our economy, neglected the crisis of health care and turned away from the American dream of growth and opportunity for all," he said.
This is the season of bluster in Ohio, the most battled over of battleground states, where every campaign is making boasts about its organizational prowess, and worrying anxiously about whether the boasts of opponents can be believed.
In refusing to look at Iraq honestly, President Bush has made defeat there more likely. This failing is only the most important repetition of a recurring theme in the war against radical Islam: the distance between Bush's soaring, often inspiring language and the insufficiency of his actions.
Brent Cunningham, managing editor of Columbia Journalism Review, does not believe the US is necessarily entering an age of partisan media. Instead, he says, 'the mainstream press has been manipulated by both sides - the Bush and Kerry camps - and both have exploited the weakness of this "he said/she said" journalism'. He says the US press is too beholden to official sources, and has become essentially passive and content to lean on someone else's version of the truth instead of assembling its own, more complete version.
Thoughts on Zell Miller's speech
Earlier today Campaign Desk reported on the failure of some big-time national reporters to address the various factual errors delivered by Vice President Cheney and Sen. Zell Miller last night at the Republican National Convention. While these papers have the largest circulations, they don't necessarily reach the voters living in the swing states that will decide this election. So we also took a look at our favorite papers from the most pivotal states -- and found, alas, that the country boys, too, had been swindled in the big city.
If Bush ran for the presidency in 2000 with a tightly focused agenda, what he offered domestically Thursday was a laundry list of ideas, big and small, that would have made former president Bill Clinton envious for its length.
Overall, a majority of voters -- 54 percent -- said they are dissatisfied with the way things are going in the country, unchanged from July and a sign that Bush remains vulnerable despite his recent gains... But when matched against Kerry on issues and character, Bush has either closed the gap or surged ahead on virtually every measure.
I think the biggest mistake so far has been that Kerry gave a convention speech with virtually no policy specifics... Now we're headed into a GOP convention during which the president is set to give a speech chock full of new policy proposals... it just seems to me that it's almost always better to frame the discussion than to have your opponent frame it, and at a time when the country could be debating John Kerry's agenda for the future, we're going to be debating George W. Bush's.
It has long been understood that Kerry's greatest potential Vietnam-related vulnerability is his leadership of an anti-war veterans group. In Karl Rove's playbook, the attack on Kerry's medals was just a softening-up exercise prior to the real assault.
There's a case to be made that it hardly matters how eloquent or effective John Kerry was at the Democratic National Convention last week. What matters infinitely more is that George W. Bush is the worst President the country has endured since Richard Nixon, and even mediocrity would be an improvement.
This madness has to stop, and the fastest way of doing that is to elect John Kerry, not because he will be different but because in most key areas - Iraq, the "war on drugs", Israel/Palestine, free trade, corporate taxes - he will be just as bad. The main difference will be that as Kerry pursues these brutal policies, he will come off as intelligent, sane and blissfully dull.
I've mentioned before that one of the reasons you shouldn't trust the SwiftVets group is that until recently a lot of them said nice things about John Kerry -- and then suddenly refreshed their memories early this year
As one of five Swift boat skippers who led the raid up the Bay Hap River, Thurlow was a direct participant in the disputed events. He is also a leading member of Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, a public advocacy group of Vietnam veterans dismayed by Kerry's subsequent antiwar activities, which has aired a controversial television advertisement attacking his war record.
"Swift Boat Veterans for Truth"--their Web site calls them Swiftvets--say Kerry lied about Vietnam. MoveOn PAC says the Swiftvets, with Bush's complicity, lied about Kerry lying.