Emotional Kerry Wowed by Crowds, While Bush Aides Are "On Edge" -- November 2, 2004 -- TimesWatch.org

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Times Watch for November 2, 2004

Emotional Kerry Wowed by Crowds,
While Bush Aides Are "On Edge"

Tracking the candidates on the eve of Election Day, the Times again contrasts a relaxed, emotional Kerry with nervous Bush aides.

Reporter David Halbfinger follows Kerry on the last day before Election Day for Tuesday's "In Kerry's Last Campaign Hours, a Softer Tone, a Call to Arms." He leads with a charming anecdote about a Kerry appearance in Milwaukee: "As his nearly two-year campaign for the presidency came down to a 20-hour last lap from Florida to Wisconsin and east and west across the Great Lakes, Senator John Kerry was halfway through his stump speech under a driving rain in Milwaukee on Monday when he stopped and surveyed his drenched but dauntless crowd. 'You guys look so wonderful, wet and bundled and all huddled up,' Mr. Kerry told thousands of Wisconsin Democrats who smiled from under slickers and garbage bags and matted hair and spongy Kerry-Edwards signs now melted to their heads. President Bush had just rallied warm, dry Republicans indoors a few blocks away, and Mr. Kerry's motorcade got an eyeful of Air Force One as it ascended just as he pulled into town. But the sight from the stage set up at the corner of State and Water Streets -- emphasis on the water -- had the senator suddenly sentimental."

Later Halbfinger gushes: "Mr. Kerry seemed as loose on stage as those around him, engaging his audiences at every step, mugging for laughs as he mocked Mr. Bush's debate body language and basking in every yelled 'You're the man, John!' and 'We love you!'….But it was in Milwaukee that Mr. Kerry seemed most relaxed, most self-deprecating, most glad and grateful to have made the long journey that was at last coming to a close. He jokingly threatened to give one of his stentorian speeches. And had it not been for the rain, he might have seemed almost misty-eyed."

The emphasis is a little different in Elisabeth Bumiller's story on the Bush campaign's trek through several swing states, which begins generically and emphasizes the tension of the race: "President Bush, fighting to hang on to the White House, campaigned furiously on Monday at raucous rallies across the breadth of the United States and then headed in the small hours hours [sic] of Election Day toward the silence of his Texas ranch. From 6:30 a.m., when the presidential motorcade left a downtown Cincinnati illuminated only by streetlamps, to 1:40 a.m. Tuesday, when his Marine One helicopter was scheduled to touch down in the darkness of Prairie Chapel Ranch, near Waco, Mr. Bush logged 2,548 miles and 19 straight hours at seven rallies in six states, five of them too close to call -- and all essential to a victory should he lose Florida."

Unlike Halbfinger's story on the emotional Kerry, Bumiller coolly eschews flattering anecdotes about Bush in favor of reporting on the nervous state of his campaign advisors: "Earlier Monday Mr. Bush's aides, after asserting for weeks that they were confident and calm, finally admitted in the last marathon stretch that they were on edge. But they said the president was serene. 'Everybody's nervous,' said Mark McKinnon, the president's chief media strategist. 'He has a total Zen attitude about it.' Mr. McKinnon said that Mr. Bush was playing a running game of gin rummy throughout the day with Karl Rove, the White House political adviser, and other longtime aides in the conference room on Air Force One and that he felt he had done everything he had to do to win. 'He knew he had to earn it, not inherit it,' Mr. McKinnon said. He added: 'I think both campaigns will go out swinging and say we left it all on the field. They ran tough and hard and we ran tough and hard.' Notably, Mr. McKinnon spoke about the recent polls with less bravado than other Bush advisers in the closing days of the campaign, and made no promises of the outcome."

Taken together, the two stories mirror the piece Halbfinger and Bumiller coauthored last Friday, which also found nervousness in the Bush camp and an optimistic Kerry.

For Bumiller's full story, click here.

For more from Halbfinger, click here.

• Elisabeth Bumiller | George W. Bush | Campaign 2004 | David Halbfinger | Sen. John Kerry

Democrats "To Insure Voters Are Not Intimidated"

James Dao and Adam Liptak's front-page story on Election Day, "G.O.P. in Ohio Can Challenge Voters at Polls" passes along Democratic accusations of vote suppression by Republicans in Florida.

First, Dao and Liptak lay out the fast-moving situation in Ohio: "In a day of see-sawing court rulings, a Federal appeals court ruled early Tuesday morning that the Republican Party could place thousands of people inside polling places to challenge the eligibility of voters, a blow to Democrats who argued those challengers will intimidate minority voters. The ruling, by the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit, in Cincinnati, reversed two lower courts that had blocked the challenges just a day before."

Later there's this sentence putting Democratic poll watchers in the most positive light, fighting against Republican intimidation: "In Florida, Republicans have said they will challenge 1,700 people with felons convictions if they show up to vote. Democrats have mustered thousands of poll watchers whose job will be to ensure that voters are not intimidated."

For the rest of Dao and Liptak, click here.

• Campaign 2004 | James Dao | Florida | Adam Liptak | Ohio

More Conservative Christian Conservatives

Conservative beat reporter David Kirkpatrick files two stories on conservative Christians. Sunday's story starts: "With one Sunday left before the election, conservative churches and Christian groups are rallying their members with a singularly intense battle cry: that this presidential race, more than any before, is a contest pitting faithful of all kinds against unbelievers."

Kirkpatrick dredges up Pat Buchanan's Republican convention speech from 1992 and tries to wrap it around Bush's neck: "Many conservative Christians say part of the reason is the contrast between Mr. Bush's openness and Senator John Kerry's reticence on the subject of faith. They say another reason is the confluence of social issues like same-sex marriage and embryonic stem cell research with the expectation of vacancies on the Supreme Court. But pollsters and political scientists say that, more than in any other presidential election, the Bush campaign and its allies have tried to capitalize on what some call 'the God gap.' Although Mr. Bush often emphasizes tolerance and inclusiveness, the grass-roots campaign has in some ways fulfilled the conservative Pat Buchanan's widely panned description at the 1992 Republican convention of a 'religious war going on in our country for the soul of America.'"

On Monday he returns with "Evangelicals See Bush as One of Them, but Will They Vote?" The term "conservative" crops up eight times within the first 200 words (meanwhile, the universal conjunction "and" makes just four appearances). A sample: "For 30 years, conservative Christians have lectured the Republican Party that its halfhearted embrace of social conservative causes had left untold millions of churchgoing voters without enough motivation to go to the polls. Now many Christian conservatives say President Bush and his White House have done more to excite those promised voters than any previous administration, putting their predictions to a test. Even beyond the immediate issues about same-sex marriage, abortion or stem-cell research, several conservatives said, the election results could determine their power in the conservative movement and the Republican Party for years to come."

For the rest of Kirkpatrick from Sunday, click here.

For the rest of Kirkpatrick from Monday, click here.

"Deceptively Cherub-Faced" Rove

Elisabeth Bumiller's "White House Letter" for Monday features "bombastic" Karl Rove: "Late last week at a campaign rally in a dark Pennsylvania pasture, thousands of supporters listened raptly to President Bush and then watched fireworks explode overhead. But other pyrotechnics were going off in a distant corner, where a giant scrum of reporters ignored the candidate but hung on to every word of a bombastic, deceptively cherub-faced man Democrats love to hate."

For the rest of Bumiller's Rove profile, click here.

• Elisabeth Bumiller | George W. Bush | Campaign 2004 | Karl Rove

Final Pre-Election Cheap Shots from the Times

The latest Sunday Arts & Leisure column by Frank Rich includes this bizarre attempt to conflate two bogus anti-Bush "scandals": "A surprise Thanksgiving visit by the president to the troops turned out to feature a 'show' turkey supplied by Halliburton." What?

And, in an Election Day editorial on Dick Cheney's surprise campaign trip to Hawaii, the editors sniff: "Republicans, no strangers to the questionable ethnic gesture, had a King Kamehameha look-alike at the Cheney rally with a spear and a loincloth, carrying a sign saying 'Hawaiians 4 Bush!'"'

Florida's Black Voters "Intimidated" by Long Lines?

Paul Krugman's final pre-election column tries hard to sound neutral while working in nasty accusations about Republican voter suppression of minorities in Florida, and sees grounds to imagine a conspiracy in long lines at the polls (as if that's a new phenomenon): "Florida's early polling was designed to make voting easier, but enormous voter turnout swamped the limited number of early polling sites. Over the weekend, people in some polling places had to stand in line for four, five, even six hours, often in the hot sun. Some of them -- African-Americans in particular -- surely suspected that those lines were so long because officials wanted to make it hard for them to vote. Yet they refused to be discouraged or intimidated….Those who govern us seem to have learned little from the 2000 electoral debacle: voting machines are still unreliable, voting officials are still unforgivably partisan."

For the full Krugman, click here.

• Campaign 2004 | Columnists | Florida | Paul Krugman

Bloggers Break On to NYT's Op-ed Page

The Times op-ed page gives bloggers their due on Election Day in "The Revolution Will Be Posted," with "posts" from a dozen bloggers from across the political spectrum. The Times introduces its readership to the strange phenomenon: "So what transformed politics this time around? The rise of the Web log, or blog. The commentary of bloggers -- individuals or groups posting daily, hourly or second-by-second observations of and opinions on the campaign on their own Web sites -- helped shape the 2004 race."

For the bloggers' takes on Campaign 2004, click here.

• Blogs | Campaign 2004 | Editorial

For Democrats, Times "Looms Larger Than Life"

Michelle Cottle of the liberal New Republic magazine is loathe to admit there's a liberal bias in the media. But in a story on how Bush and Kerry see the media differently, she finds Democrats who admit to holding the Times in high regard, an impulse ingrained in childhood: "Dems' slightly elevated view of the media translates into deeper anxiety about how they are portrayed in it. 'There's no question that we spend an inordinate amount of time trying to figure out The New York Times,' says Carter Eskew, a top adviser to Al Gore in 2000. 'When there's a bad story in the Times, it creates all sorts of incredible tumult and turmoil….In part, the problem is cultural, posits Eskew. 'Democrats are people who basically grew up going to the beach in the summer, and their parents had reserved a copy of the Times at the local supermarket. It was an important thing. They can still remember the excitement at seeing what was on the cover of the Sunday magazine.' For these folks, the paper of record looms larger than life."

• Michelle Cottle | Democrats | Liberal Bias | The New York Times

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