Swing Voters "Liking What They See" In Kerry -- October 4, 2004 -- TimesWatch.org

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Times Watch for October 4, 2004

Swing Voters "Liking What They See" In Kerry

As the two campaigns hit the hustings after last week's first presidential debate, the Times stresses the optimism in the Kerry camp and fretting among the Bushies. Here's part of Sunday's story from David Halbfinger, on the Kerry trail in Florida: "Mr. Kerry's wildly cheering audiences on Friday in Tampa and Kissimmee, and in Orlando on Saturday, suggested that core Democratic voters, too, were energized by the debate. Ken Rutledge, a Teamsters organizer, said he had voted for Mr. Bush in 2000 but had decided to switch his vote to Mr. Kerry during Thursday's debate. 'He's coming along,' said Mr. Rutledge, 39, after listening to the senator's speech. 'I think he's starting to appeal to more people.' Marie Bongarcon, 63, a Haitian-born custodian at the high school where Mr. Kerry spoke, had nearly exhausted herself leaping from her seat to applaud during his speech. 'I love Kerry,' she said in heavily accented English. 'Everything he say is true.'"

Writing from Ohio for Monday under the enthusiastic headline: "An Invigorated Kerry Courts Ohio, and Some Swing Voters Are Taking a Harder Look," Halbfinger sounds pretty enthusiastic as well: "The candidate consigned to the empathetic Bill Clinton's shadow, having spent the better part of that time sharing the pain of 500 members of what he calls the squeezed middle class, was bathing in their embrace….Mr. Kerry's compassion for the man on stage, [Katy] Curtis said, and his plans to reverse job losses and soaring health care and tuition costs, made her feel that he could address her own worries -- a wellspring of emotion arising from her and her husband's inability to help their daughter pay for college, and their flirtation with bankruptcy. If Ms. Curtis and a few other previously undecided Ohioans who came to Mr. Kerry's town-hall meeting here and some new polls are any indication, swing voters are giving Mr. Kerry a second look after his strong showing in the first presidential debate. And they are liking what they see."

Using a tone that echoes his early, enthusiastic Kerry campaign coverage, Halbfinger notes: "Since the debate, Mr. Kerry's aides have regained the spring in their step that they -- those who were on the campaign then, at least -- suddenly found back in early January, as he surged in the polls in Iowa….He also had a little fun at Mr. Bush's expense, saying: 'I welcome hard work. I like hard work.' And when another steelworker asked Mr. Kerry about trade, he scolded Mr. Bush, saying the president imposed a three-year temporary tariff on steel imports but then 'pulled the rug out from under that halfway through.' 'I don't know, but I think, that if you're against tariffs, and then you put tariffs in place, and then you take them off, that's just a flip, flop, flip,' Mr. Kerry said, as his audience laughed along."

Much more muted was Sunday's profile of Bush in Ohio, from Richard Stevenson: "Mr. Bush hit Mr. Kerry on foreign policy even as he spent most of the day talking about economic issues. While Mr. Kerry was in Florida saying that the president had misled the nation on economic issues as well as on Iraq, Mr. Bush said the economy was improving, pointing to the 1.7 million jobs that had been created in the last year and the drop in the unemployment rate to 5.4 percent from a peak of 6.3 percent in June 2003. He did not mention that the nation had 900,000 fewer nonfarm jobs than when he took office and that unemployment was still well above the 4.2 percent rate of January 2001."

Stevenson gave a Kerry adviser the last word: "Seeking to rebut Mr. Bush's characterization of Mr. Kerry's stance on pre-emptive war, Richard C. Holbrooke, a former ambassador to the United Nations who is a foreign policy adviser to Mr. Kerry, told reporters on a conference call that Mr. Bush's statements were a 'clear-cut misrepresentation….Who in his right mind' would not want the support of the American people and allies around the world for pre-emptive action, Mr. Holbrooke asked. Mr. Holbrooke characterized as 'appalling' Mr. Bush's suggestion during the debate that by questioning the president's handling of the war Mr. Kerry was emboldening enemies and demoralizing American troops."

For more of Halbfinger on Kerry from Florida, click here.

For more of Halbfinger on Kerry from Ohio, click here.

For the rest of Stevenson following Bush in Ohio, click here.

Chafee's "Painful Journey of
Political Conscience" to Diss Bush

Sheryl Gay Stolberg's latest softball profile of a Republican critical of Bush appears in Monday's paper. "In the Senate, Raising a (Quiet) Republican Voice Against the Administration" looks at liberal Republican Sen. Lincoln Chafee of Rhode Island, who has announced he will not vote for Bush.

"One day after the Supreme Court sealed the 2000 election for George W. Bush, his running mate, Dick Cheney, went to the Capitol for a private lunch with five moderate Republican senators. The agenda he laid out that day in December 2000 stunned Senator Lincoln Chafee of Rhode Island, sending Mr. Chafee on a painful journey of political conscience that, he said in an interview last week, has culminated with his decision not to vote for Mr. Bush in November."

Stolberg portrays liberal Republican Chafee as a genial innocent moderate among conservative Republican wolves: "On Capitol Hill, some regard Mr. Chafee, a soft-spoken, gentle man who once shoed horses for a living, as the Republican counterpart to Senator Zell Miller, the fiery Georgia Democrat who is campaigning for Mr. Bush. But the truth is more complex. While Mr. Miller is retiring, Mr. Chafee is planning to run again in 2006. His misgivings about his party's conservative tilt have thrust him into a powerful position in Washington, where Republicans' memories are still fresh of how another moderate, Senator James M. Jeffords of Vermont, defected in 2001 and became an independent, temporarily giving Democrats control of the Senate."

More about the cerebral innocence of Chafee: "At 51, Mr. Chafee, who was appointed to the Senate after his father's death in 1999 and then won handily in an election the following year, is a curious figure in Washington. Pensive and intellectual, he hardly appears suited for the bare-knuckle world of politics and seems to exist on the periphery of things, ambling about the Capitol like an absent-minded professor making a study of its power-hungry inhabitants. Some call him quirky; others think of him as the accidental senator, a political version of the loner protagonist in the Anne Tyler novel 'The Accidental Tourist.'"

No Stolberg profile is complete without a reference to the vaunted "independence" of whatever moderate or liberal Republican she's profiling: "In the Capitol, Republicans are trying to keep their disenchantment quiet. Senator Trent Lott of Mississippi -- who suffered from Mr. Chafee's independence when the Rhode Island senator called for him to step down as majority leader over racially charged remarks -- laughed at the mention of Mr. Chafee's name."

For the rest of Stolberg on Chafee, click here.

• George W. Bush | Campaign 2004 | Sen. John Chafee | Senate | Sheryl Gay Stolberg

Reporters Cackled Over Bush's Debate Performance

Jim Rutenberg's front-page story on Monday on the post-debate spin game provides a look at the mindset of other reporters watching the debate: "The loudest cackles among the reporters covering the first presidential debate broke out at about 9:55 on Thursday night in a vast, mirrored filing center at the University of Miami, where important impressions of the candidates' performance were just beginning to gel. And President Bush was on the receiving end. Many of the hundreds of reporters, who were not in the actual debate hall but watching on televisions atop rolling carts next door in the university's 'Wellness Center,'' hooted when Mr. Bush appeared to stumble, blurting out haltingly, 'Of course I know Osama bin Laden attacked us -- I know that,' in response to Senator John Kerry's implication that he had conflated Iraq and Al Qaeda. That moment in Coral Gables, Fla., was a crucial step in the days-long formation of conventional wisdom about how the debate played out for Mr. Bush and Mr. Kerry, who was also on the receiving end of guffaws but none so loud and sustained."

For the rest of Rutenberg on the post-debate spin, click here.

A Faulty Diagnosis of Swift Boat Charges

A front-page story by reporter and physician Lawrence Altman on Kerry's recent release of health records, is headlined, "On Kerry's Journey to Health, Stops for Shrapnel and Cancer."

Altman begins: "Senate John Kerry, a lean athlete who is the picture of health as he skis, skates, cycles and windsurfs, is in robust condition, he and his doctors said in their first extended interviews discussing his medical history."

Later he segues into the Swift Boat story: "Mr. Kerry's injuries as a young man, however, seem to have given him more trouble -- political trouble, that is -- than his shoulder surgery. A group of veterans has challenged the validity of the three Purple Hearts that Mr. Kerry received for wounds he suffered while serving on Swift boats in the Vietnam war. These critics suggested that the shrapnel that hit him in one mission was rice, not metal. However, CT scan X-rays taken at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston document that two pieces of metal shrapnel are embedded deep in Mr. Kerry's left thigh, next to the femur, said Dr. Gerald J. Doyle, Mr. Kerry's personal physician in Boston who reviewed the X-rays at the request of this reporter, who is a physician. Doctors treating the wound in 1969 decided to leave the shrapnel in place. 'One piece of shrapnel is about the size of a bullet, the other a bit smaller,' Dr. Doyle said."

But some experts on the Swift Boat story aren't impressed with the good doctor's diagnosis. Tom Maguire points out some confusion in Altman's account: "Kerry got three Purple Hearts; the first and third have been questioned, but I don't think there is serious doubt that he deserved his second….The shrapnel he has today came with his second Purple Heart; the 'rice in buttocks' came on his March 13 Purple Heart, and is well documented."

Blogger "Beldar" adds: "The 'accusation' that Kerry was also treated for 'rice' blown into his butt earlier in the day on 13Mar69 from careless behavior around a grenade used to blow up a rice pile has its origins not from the SwiftVets, but from Kerry supporter and rescuee James Rassmann, as reported in Brinkley's Tour of Duty. Even the most fundamental, basic research that any junior high school newspaper reporter would have done would have alerted the NYT's Altman that the metal shrapnel thigh wound from on 20Feb69, and likewise the Purple Heart medal resulting therefrom (that is, Kerry's second Purple Heart), has never been seriously contested by the SwiftVets."

For the rest of Altman's diagnosis, click here.

• Lawrence Altman | Campaign 2004 | Sen. John Kerry | Swift Boat Veterans | Vietnam

Kerry Doesn’t Flip Flop, He Just "Changes His Emphasis"

Saturday's front-page debate aftermath story by David Rosenbaum, "In the Debate, Exaggerations And Shadings," argues that Kerry really isn't a flip-flopper on Iraq -- he merely emphasizes different things at different times: "Concerning Iraq, a review of Mr. Kerry's public statements found that his position had been quite consistent. But as the politics changed, Mr. Kerry repeatedly changed his emphasis. News accounts reflected what he was emphasizing at the time. And Mr. Kerry was often unclear in expressing his views. Since well before the presidential campaign began, Mr. Kerry has maintained that Saddam Hussein was a menace and that removing him from power was a worthy goal. He has said that the president needed the authority to use troops in Iraq. But Mr. Kerry has also said that Mr. Bush should not have gone to war without exhausting all diplomatic alternatives and without mobilizing international support. And he has insisted that the war's cost should be covered as much as possible by repealing tax cuts for the wealthy enacted during the Bush presidency."

Well, that certainly clears things up regarding Kerry's position on Iraq.

For the rest of Rosenbaum on the debate, click here.

• George W. Bush | Campaign 2004 | Debates | Iraq War | David Rosenbaum

E-mail TimesWatch Director, Clay Waters, with TimesWatch feedback at cwaters@mediaresearch.org