Ladies and Gentlemen,
I am responding to The Note, published today, in slightly different terms than your request.
I didn't vote for Gore and now intend to vote for Bush. However, I DO have comments on the "vote attraction" qualities of Kerry, as different from Gore. I went to college with Kerry, and preceded him as an officer and debater in the Yale Political Union. He has changed very little -- more money and more wrinkles notwithstanding -- since then.
I wrote about that first, six months ago, most recently, this week. You can run me through Google News, if interested in seeing that. I also am ABD for a Ph.D. in political science. From that, and from the real world, I know that turnout depends, in part, on likability. While I have never met President Bush, from analyzing his public appearances, I feel certain that he is WYSIWYG, as they say in computer programming. ("What you see is what you get.")
The unstated assumption in your entire Note today is that Bush will be as voter attractive, no more no less, than he was in 2000. And that Kerry will be as voter attractive as Gore was. Both sides of that assumption are, in my judgment, false. And that changes the entire equation that you set out.
Sincerely,
John Armor, Esq. (address & phone)
Congressman Billybob
Latest column, "Says the Wuss: Ma, He's Touching Me"
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Ladies & Gentlemen --You asked if there were any people who voted for Gore who will be switching to Bush.
My mother turned 91 this summer. She cast her first presidential ballot for Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1936. She has voted Democrat in the presidential elections ever since.
But, in 1999, she switched her registration from Democrat to Independent. There was one reason: she believed the party had sold its soul to support a rapist and a liar in the impeachment trial.
Nonetheless, she voted for Gore in 2000 -- hopeful that the party could rediscover its bearings, now that Clinton was on the sidelines.
In 2004, however, she will cast her first presidential ballot in favor of a Republican -- for George W. Bush. There are two reasons:
1. In challenging the Florida vote, the Democrat party had revealed that it had NOT rediscovered its bearings and remained as venal and dishonest as it had been during the Clinton administration -- disinterested in the nation's welfare and consumed by its own ambition for power. (That's a pretty close paraphrase of what she told me).
2. Since Florida and, especially, since 9/11, she has observed that the national media are acting in a purely partisan fashion, committed to the defeat of Bush and the election of a Democrat, any Democrat. She no longer trusts anything that the so-called mainstream media might say about anything political. And she's come to recognize that politics also guide the media's coverage of environmental and social issues, as well.
Thus, congratulations are due to network news outlets like ABC. You've contributed toward changing an established voting habit of 64 years. I couldn't do it. But you and the party itself have accomplished what I couldn't...
okie01