posted on March 13, 2004 08:51:34 AM new
With his inability to speak extemporaneously, general ignorance, and poor pronunciation, Bush would be reminiscent of Nixon in the 1960 debates.
BOSTON (Reuters) - Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry, visiting the site of one of the most famous political debates in U.S. history, planned to challenge President Bush on Saturday to a "real discussion about America's future" in a monthly series of debates.
Kerry, already engaged in a running exchange of negative ads with Bush eight months before the November election, planned to deliver the challenge at the site of the historic Abraham Lincoln-Stephen Douglas debates in Quincy, Illinois.
That series of 1858 senatorial debates between Douglas and Lincoln, who lost the Senate election but won the presidency two years later, is legendary in U.S. political history for elevating crucial issues like slavery and states' rights to the front of the U.S. political agenda.
"Surely, if the attack ads can start now at least we can agree to start a real discussion about America's future," Kerry said in remarks prepared for delivery in Quincy, Illinois, later on Saturday.
Bush and Kerry have exchanged negative ads in the past few days, with Bush criticizing Kerry by name for planning to raise taxes and threatening to weaken U.S. security and Kerry firing back at his "misleading" accusations.
Kerry challenged the Republican president to monthly debates on the "great issues" of the day, including the war on terrorism, the loss of U.S. jobs and the plight of Americans without health care.
"2004 can't be just another year of politics as usual," Kerry said in the text. "The challenges we face are just too grave and too great.
"We confront big issues -- as big as any in our history -- and they call for a new and historic commitment to a real and informed exchange of ideas."
Quincy was the site of the sixth of seven Lincoln-Douglas debates in 1858, with 20,000 people - double the town's population -- gathering to hear the two men, who shared a river steamer to their next debate.
"Maybe George Bush and I won't travel on the same boat or the same airplane, but we can give this country a campaign that genuinely addresses our real issues and treats voters with respect," Kerry said.
After the Quincy rally, Kerry planned to travel to Pennsylvania and Ohio on Sunday as he continues appearances in states with upcoming primaries, even though he has clinched the Democratic nomination.
After a brief vacation next week, Kerry will embark on a 20-city fund-raising tour at the end of the month to try to close the cash gap on Bush, who had $100 million more on hand at the end of January. Kerry has raised more than $10 million on the Internet since he effectively clinched the nomination on March 2.
posted on March 13, 2004 10:26:59 AM new
I don't agree....he should refuse for his own sake. And I, for one, think he would be great in debates with kerry.....because he knows what he's talking about and could challenge some of the changes kerry's proposing. He could challenge all the flip-flops kerry's been making.
Just like the lastest Bush ad - on the $900B dollar increases in spending. Kerry's side is screaming about that figure. The Bush side took all the 'new benefits' American's are supposedly going to gain under a kerry administration....added up the cost of those same programs and that's the total increase in spending they came up with.
Now kerry's side's objecting because that was said. He says he's never given a figure. True, he never said they would total $900B dollars. But he hasn't/can't give a figure of his own when asked by the media. His answer; He's going to get his people to calculate the math. He should have *already done that* as he's been promising the 'world' to so many, he should have already had an idea how much he was going to have to *raise taxes* to pay for all those wonderful changes.
So easy to promise all these wonderful changes/benefits.....but when given the choice of how much people want their taxes raised...it will be a whole new ball game, imo.
I think debates between the two would favor this President.
posted on March 13, 2004 12:07:02 PM new
Bush can't handle a debate and everyone in the Bush administration knows that.
Look at Bush's very occasional press conferences as an illustration of his inability to handle simple questions. He is asked pre-approved questions by reporters chosen before the conference from a predetermined list. This policy abandons a long tradition of spontaneity by previous presidents.
George Bush would fall flat on his face if faced with an unscripted debate with Kerry. He and the administration know this and so, it will not happen.
Reporters arrive at the conference and behave like a pitiful bunch of scared rabbits. If you want to see some good reporting read the transcripts of poor Scott McClelland.
Now, with everything under the sun in disarray, they can only concentrate on "image" and negative campaigning against Kerry. They can't afford to discuss issues because that would clearly define him as a miserable failure to those who have had their head in the sand. They want to rely on image rather than issues so that people like linda will believe their ads.
posted on March 13, 2004 12:10:32 PM new Isolated White House is losing its Midas touch
Josh Marshall
March 13, 2004
Folks of all political complexions concede that this has been a dismal couple months for the White House.
In December, the president was buoyed by the capture of Saddam and a string of impressive economic statistics. But since then, it’s been almost all downhill — a mix of bad outside events over which the White House had little immediate control (bad jobs numbers, for instance) and tactical goofs that appear to be coming more and more frequently.
So has Karl Rove lost that Midas touch?
The answer is that we’re looking at a White House that is increasingly insular and isolated.
Most specifically, its missteps show how deeply out of touch it is with how much its public credibility has atrophied over the last eight months.
Consider a few examples.
Let’s start with the president’s endorsement of a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage. No doubt, the president’s stance confirmed his standing among evangelicals and other Christian conservatives.
And there is some sign that the White House may actually have gone this route to stanch a rapid deterioration of support among middle-age non-college-educated men who were losing confidence in the White House over economic issues and the war.
What’s most striking about the public response to the president’s announcement, however, has been that swing voters and what we might call consensus media opinion have tended to see the announcement as crassly political and an effort to sow divisions in the country for political gain.
Polls still clearly show that the American public opposes gay marriage. But contrary to all expectations, by backing a constitutional amendment, the president seems to have got on the wrong side of public opinion on gay rights — quite a feat considering how divisive this issue remains and how uncomfortable most Americans still are with public discussions of homosexuality.
In other words, the president’s declining credibility — an underlying belief that his motives are purely political — has helped put him on the wrong side of an issue on which most of the public actually agrees with him.
Next up: the White House’s continuing insistence — at least until Tuesday — that the president would give only one hour of his time to the two co-chairmen of the Sept. 11 commission.
Any White House would put limits on investigators’ access to the president, if only out of an institutional desire to preserve the prerogatives and privileges of the office.
But this White House has taken that protective impulse to an almost comical degree with its one-hour restriction. And, more to the point, it’s clearly losing that battle.
After taking a couple weeks of press punishment, White House press secretary Scott McClellan made it pretty clear Tuesday that Bush will give way on this one, too.
In other words, this is turning out to be a big political goof. The administration took a beating on it from the press and is giving in anyway.
Finally, there’s the biggest stumble in recent weeks: the president’s Sept. 11-laced campaign ad with the image of a flag-draped coffin being carried from the rubble of Ground Zero.
Democrats have long feared the day when the Bush campaign would pull out the heavy artillery of its campaign war chest.
But even Republican operatives are now privately telling reporters that this was a clumsy use of the president’s campaign resources, which has done him more harm than good. Why didn’t they see this coming?
Defenders of the White House still say that this misses the point, that just getting the public focused on Sept. 11 got the campaign back on the president’s turf.
But that assertion just doesn’t quite ring true, since there were other ways to play the Sept. 11 card without showing the coffin that’s generated all the bad press.
Perhaps the president with the megaphone cheering the rescue workers a couple days after the attacks? Or images from his well-received speech to a joint session of Congress several days later?
Taken together, these and other examples paint a picture of a White House that is going from stumble to stumble or just can’t catch a break. But when we look at each of these goofs, we can see a deeper pattern at work.
If the president had run similar ads in the 2002 election cycle, would he have caught the same flak? I doubt it.
He almost certainly would have gotten away with stiff-arming the Sept. 11 commission, too.
But something has changed. And you can see it in the reaction to the gay-marriage-ban-amendment gambit as well. For years the president has profited from a majority of the public’s gut-level belief that his motives are sound.
The simple truth is that this White House’s public credibility has atrophied dramatically over the last eight months. It can’t get away with stuff it could have managed easily less than a year ago.
The president and his advisers keep stumbling because they’ve yet to truly realize how much the ground has moved beneath their feet.
