[Dan from Michigan]

Union independents, however, are vastly outnumbered by the legions of other independents who would have refused to vote for GWB back in 2000 if he had publicly said that he wanted to end the ban on assault weapons and that he was against Campaign Finance Reform.

1. On the AW ban - Where would it cost him? California? Jersey? New York? Connecticutt? Illinois? He lost those anyway. What legions of independents? From my maps, he already lost the major anti-gun areas.(and in my state, Gore took the union vote big because of Bush's dad and the Japanese.)

2. Bush said he was against McCain/Feingold. He did say he supported Campaign finance reform, but not that piece.

[Southack]

"What legions of independents?"

The 16 million (including probably a million in Florida) voters who went for Perot in 1992/1996, for starters.

As best that I could tell, Perot voters were splitting 3 for Bush for every 2 for Gore. Disturbing that ratio by chasing more from Bush to Gore would have been disasterous for us.

Sheesh, we only won by 577 votes out of 100 million. There's absolutely no room for error in that margin. Bush was definitively as far to the Right as was humanly possible to be elected to the Presidency back in 2000 with pre-9/11-mindset voters.

Sure, we Conservatives would prefer to see him be even more Right-Wing, but surely we aren't so blind as to repeat our Goldwater mistake of 1964, whereby we went for the ideal right-wing candidate, and the nation left us behind (stuck with neo-Communist LBJ, in fact).