Free Republic

John Kerry is running the dumbest presidential campaign in modern history. Don't misunderstand. Dumb is not the same as wrong. Kerry may be right on some of the issues. But that's not the point. Elections are about votes, and Kerry's campaign seems calculated to actually repel them. Have a look: Taxes. The first rule of politics is: Low taxes, good; high taxes, bad. President Bush understands this. He is running as a tax cutter, plain and simple. Elect him and you pay less. Kerry, on the other hand, wants to raise taxes. Just on the rich, he says, but nobody...

Saturday night I met Michael Graham at the NRO Party. Exceptionally smart guy. He's got a scarily plausible theory about what the Democrats could do if things look grim in October. So - presume, for the purposes of this theory, that some significant scandal comes out of Max Cleland's comments that he briefly spoke with alleged CBS memo source Bill Burkett. Suppose that the Democratic National Committee's "Operation Fortunate Son" attack ads and press conferences were organized as a result of the CBS memos. Suppose the Kerry campaign sees these memos from Burkett, thinks they are fake, but decides to...

DOES KERRY WANT OUT? Despite the conventional wisdom that Kerry has been planning a run for the Presidency his whole adult life, feels entitled to it, and has created situations and photo ops all along the way to support it, I think the man in his current meltdown is showing the unmistakable signs and actions of a person who has decided he really does NOT want to be President of the United States. Is this a conscious realization for him, or is it subliminal? Who knows. Has he realized that, unlike his Senate career where he can have both prestige...

With all of the inconsistencies in the Kerry Campaign for the good of his party, and the good America why don’t he just pull out of the race? It defies logic for him to stay in the race at this point. I mean, for a man, an admitted War Criminal, a traitor, a man who plotted to kill senators, has FALSE MILITARY DOCUMENTS on his website, accused his fellow soldiers of War Crimes not isolated incidents but crimes committed on a day-to-day basis with the full awareness of officers at all levels of command, lies to the Senate about Cambodia...

I know it is hypothetical, but what is the law about substituting someone else for Kerry/Edwards now that he has accepted the nomination. Can Kerry be substituted for on the ballot? Why not figure it out now, rather than scramble around for the reasons it is illegal when they pull it on us. The first reaction will be critical.

I am of the opinion that this Kerry brouhaha is going to culminate in a Kerry withdrawal, pretty much around the end of september. I guess I am part of the vrwc crowd, because I can't help but remember the fiasco in NJ. This is getting to be more and more of a sideshow, with the two lovebirds hugging and kissing all over the country (Kerry and Edwards, not the married ones), while dining well... (...let them have cake!) It is such a fantastic array of events, leading up to now, that I guess I am just really suspicious!!!

I'm afraid that Kerry could drop out in early Sep if "Unfit For Duty", the anti-Kerry Vietnam book, gets major exposure. What if the GOP goes into the convention 10 - 15 points up, and then Bush gets a HUGE bump out of the convention? Does anybody really think the Democrats will keep a candidate 20 - 25 points down with no chance to win? What are the legalities regarding putting Shrillary on the Ticket? What are Edwards' chances of winning after a Kerry drop-out???

Left's Enthusiasm for Kerry Varies Greatly by Mary Clare Cardinale Posted Jun 22, 2004 Democrats can't seem to decide what they think about their candidate. Here are three examples from major newspapers in recent weeks which illustrate the varying degrees of excitement for John Kerry among liberals: The Washington Post Reports on Ambivalence: The Post noted that Democrats are much more passionate about defeating Bush than they are about electing Kerry. One reason for the ambivalence is that Kerry has not put forward much of a message beyond being opposed to most of Bush's agenda. In fact, Kerry's lack of...

BLOOMINGTON, Ind. -- Several months ago, I wrote a column titled "Who is John Kerry?" I have yet to get a reasonable answer. Of course, there were a lot of letters to the editor slamming both me and President Bush for attacking Kerry, but none to my knowledge had much of anything to say in support of Kerry. Can anyone say why they will vote for Kerry other than the fact that his last name isn't Bush? The few people I have talked to who can say definitively why they will vote for Kerry are single-issue voters. Specifically, they are...

No sense of excitement for candidate John Kerry BY MICHAEL PUTNEY mputney@local10.com I spent Sunday afternoon getting reacquainted with politics at its basic level: going door to door asking for votes. Members of several South Florida unions were doing the asking; I tagged along to hear their pitch and listen to the reaction. ''Not interested,'' said the man who answered the door at the Smith household in Plantation, heard the pitch and then slammed the door shut. But he was the only one who wasn't interested or willing to talk about issues and presidential candidates at the dozen or so...

Joan Blades received a standing ovation, which is not at all unusual these days when she appears before "progressive" activist groups around the country. A thin, cerebral-looking woman with glasses and a 60's-ish hairstyle, Blades is the co-founder of MoveOn.org, the Internet-based group that is raising and spending millions of dollars to defeat President George W. Bush. This time, appearing June 3 before a gathering organized by the liberal organizing group Campaign for America's Future in Washington, Blades wanted to say something she'd been thinking about for quite a while. She told the audience her talk had been titled,...

Kerry + Wilgoren--Perfect Together!Can the Democratic nominee really be this charmless?By Mickey KausUpdated Monday, June 14, 2004, at 12:15 AM PT Does Even John Kerry Deserve Jodi Wilgoren? Jodi Wilgoren's Sunday front page NYT piece goes beneath the surface to uncover the "many facets of Mr. Kerry's style and personality that [are] all but invisible to most voters in this era of stage-managed politics, where authentic insights into the people who would be president are precious few." [Emph. added] There's a self-puffing, expectations-raising billboard graf! And what does Wilgoren come up with after her "observations on the campaign trail over several months, combined with interviews with politicians and aides...

John F. Kerry has shattered fundraising records, unified an oft-warring party and pushed past President Bush in some national polls. Yet many Democratic voters, officials and even members of Kerry's staff express an ambivalence -- or angst -- about their presidential candidate that belies this strong public standing. These Democrats say the enthusiasm for defeating Bush runs much stronger and deeper than the passion for electing Kerry. The chief reason: The senator from Massachusetts, they say, has not crisply articulated what a Kerry presidency would stand for beyond undoing much of the Bush agenda.

John F. Kerry has shattered fundraising records, unified an oft-warring party and pushed past President Bush in some national polls. Yet many Democratic voters, officials and even members of Kerry's staff express an ambivalence -- or angst -- about their presidential candidate that belies this strong public standing. These Democrats say the enthusiasm for defeating Bush runs much stronger and deeper than the passion for electing Kerry. The chief reason: The senator from Massachusetts, they say, has not crisply articulated what a Kerry presidency would stand for beyond undoing much of the Bush agenda. So far, these concerns have not...

John F. Kerry has shattered fund-raising records, unified an oft-warring party and pushed past President Bush in some national polls. Yet many Democratic voters, officials and even members of Kerry's staff express an ambivalence - or angst - about their presidential candidate that belies this strong public standing. These Democrats say the enthusiasm for defeating Bush runs much stronger and deeper than the passion for electing Kerry. The chief reason: The Massachusetts senator, they say, has been unable to crisply articulate what a Kerry presidency would stand for beyond undoing much of the Bush agenda. So far, these concerns have...

Things not to say in public This evening, Los Angeles City Councilman Antonio Villaraigosa spoke at a meeting of the California League of Conservation Voters. One member of the audience asked him if he planned on running for Mayor. He mentioned the recent "push poll" on the race, noting that Mayor Hahn (like Kerry) was everybody's second choice...then he continued saying that running against an incumbent was difficult, unless it was an unpopular incumbent. Then he said this gem to applause: "After all, let's face it. Is anyone excited about electing John Kerry or do you really want to defeat...

Joan Blades was only saying what the crowd was thinking. At the big conference put on by the left-wing group Campaign for America’s Future last week, Blades, co-founder of MoveOn.org, was taking part in a panel discussion on the upcoming presidential election. She told the audience that her talk had been titled “We Can Win” but that she had begun to think “that’s a little behind the time.” “At a conference in March here in D.C.,” Blades continued, “one of the attendees asked me, ‘Why aren’t we talking about a landslide in November?’” “And I decided, OK, well, maybe I...

You couldn't turn on the news last week in America without thinking that it was a good moment for a stiff drink. Part of that was Teddy Kennedy and the power of suggestion. Those gin-blossomed jowls have been shaking all over the screen the past few weeks, their owner bellowing that only John Kerry can rescue the country from ruin and disgrace. Then there were the reports of terrorists' "chatter" and an all-points alert for seven swarthy villains from Central Casting, one of them a woman with a degree in neurochemistry and two others said to be trained pilots. The...

How vapid and aimless are the Bush haters of America's far left? Jules Witcover's column today in the Baltimore Sun offers a perfect illustration. Reporting from a left-wing conference in Washington, Witcover noted that speaker Howard Dean had the usual suspects in the sort of frenzy John Kerry could never spark. Leftist commentator Jim Hightower then roused the crowd by saying: "I don't care if John Kerry is a sack of cement. We'll carry him to victory." Then he remarked: "I have a two-step program for you. First we get rid of Bush. Then we get rid of Kerry." Ah,...

Melancholy Democrats Queasy Over Kerry Posted by Isaiah Sterrett Friday, May 21, 2004 REMEMBER the Clinton years? Democrats were so much happier then. Their biggest worry was impeachment—and even that wasn’t too serious. They won easily in 1992, thanks to Ross Perot’s ambitions and George H.W. Bush’s lack of ambitions, and they won again four years later, thanks to Republican Loyalty to Old Senators From Kansas Who Have Precisely No Chance of Winning. There were problems in those elections for America, of course—dead soldiers in Africa and the Middle-East; Elian Gonzales thrown back to Cuba; cigars in the Oval Office...