Posted on 09/04/2004 5:30:31 AM PDT by TC Rider
Ads questioning Bush's record on workplace, family, environmental and Christian issues appear in New York
Not only coffin-toting street protesters voiced opposition to President Bush in New York City this week. Several North Carolinians dissented in big-dollar newspaper spreads.
Mitchell Gold, a maker of trendy Pottery Barn and Restoration Hardware furniture, did it. So did environmentalist Rick Dove and a string of prominent clergy.
Gold bought a $50,000-plus, two-page ad Sunday in The New York Times Magazine. In a letter next to a portrait of himself and his partner, Bob Williams, Gold urged Bush to visit their factory outside Hickory.
There, said Gold, a Democrat and gay rights activist, "real" family values prevail, such as on-site child care and health benefits for workers.
Gold is no stranger to politics or politicians. Last month, he was a North Carolina delegate to the Democratic National Convention in Boston. Not long ago, he updated Al and Tipper Gore's Virginia abode with Mitchell Gold Co.'s crisp designs.
"People just assume that to have a profitable business, you have to be a Republican," Gold said this week from a New York hotel. "I'd give all those tax cuts back tomorrow for better education in this country and better health care." (TC Comment: What's stopping him? Probably a better use of his spare cash than preaching to the Lib choir in the NY Times)
Dove, a retired Marine Corps judge and one-time Neuse riverkeeper, appears in a far more somber full-page ad published Monday in The New York Times. In it, the MoveOn political action committee displays portraits of nine people above the line: "I voted Republican in 2000." "We're Voting for Kerry in 2004," in bigger type, anchors the page's bottom.
Truth be told, Dove didn't vote for Bush in 2000, though he said he voted GOP outside the presidential race. A longtime Republican, he accepted MoveOn's invitation because of his alarm over the president's environmental record, especially in protecting waterways, he said.
"He's not a good Republican conservative," Dove said. "Conservatives don't just conserve tax dollars, they conserve our air, our water, our wildlife."
Christians dissent
The left-leaning Christian group Sojourners spent more than $60,000 to publish a full-page display titled: "God Is Not a Republican. Or a Democrat." It also appeared in The New York Times on Monday.
More than 40,000 people signed a petition declaring "... leaders of the Religious Right mistakenly claim that God has taken a side in this election, and that Christians should only vote for George W. Bush." Duke University divinity professor Richard B. Hays is one of 43 prominent signers named in the ad, along with four other North Carolinians.
For Hays, the ad was a way to talk back to divisive messages he said he's heard too long from right-wing Christians. (TC Comment: Not sure where he ever heard from right-wing Christians, they are not welcome on campus at Duke where they are the smallest minority. More Dem tolerance. At Duke, conservatives are shunned and dismissed as too stupid to hold faculty positions.)
"In a lot of places in this country, people now associate Christianity with angry, narrow-minded, hawkish views of the world," Hays said. "Many of us feel that is a very distorted and narrow view."
Hays still has limited confidence in the power of the pen. He doesn't expect the petition changed the minds of any GOP delegates this week. But maybe, he said, it stirred thought among the millions of Americans who read about it.
Staff writer Catherine Clabby can be reached at 956-2414 or cclabby@newsobserver.com
Or, the willingness of MoveOn.org and other Dem 527s to lie through their teeth? (Truth be told, Dove didn't vote for Bush in 2000)
Imagine what will happen to this special interest groups when they have no democrat party.
Imagine they will have to form their own "little" political parties. 527's may be the wave of the future and one of them may become the replacement for the Democrat party.
That's all we need, the MoveOn party!
I just wonder how many of the 'switched' voters in the MoveOn ad were frauds like our Tarheel.
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