16 DAYS LEFT: WHERE DOES KERRY *STILL* NEED TO IMPROVE?

[ulTRAX]

The clock is ticking and Kerry still hasn't done as good a job as he could on some vital issues. Here's my list of where I think it's clear Kerry could improve:

Generally Kerry is not articulating those broad brush strokes that separate the Democrats from the Right. There are two areas Kerry needs to improve on. The first is the Bush Doctrine. The second is fiscal policy.

BUSH DOCTRINE: The Bush Doctrine is a radical departure in US foreign policy. It claims to counter "gathering threats"... and we see in Iraq, the first test case of this doctrine, that such a standard is so vague as to allow anyone to hijack this doctrine as pretense to pursue their own agenda. This is exactly what happened when the neo-cons manipulated intelligence to sell to the public a war they always wanted. In the process they have bogged US forces needed elsewhere in a quagmire.

MASSACHUSETTS LIBERAL: Bush is painting Kerry using broad brush strokes.... calling him a Massachusetts liberal on the far left. Why can't Kerry make Bush's ultra-rightist agenda an issue? Kerry could be painting those broad brush stokes that since Reagan the Right has been using fiscal irresponsibility as a weapon to dismantle government. In 2000 Bush promised fiscal responsibility, to preserve the surplus, yet he sabotaged debt paydown at every turn. The Right would rather see 320-360 Billion a year pissed away on interest than ever pay down the debt to free this money up for a Democratic agenda. Why can't Kerry expose the Right's agenda? If the Democrats ever hope to counter the Right's agenda to use fiscal irresponsibility to sabotage government, then reframing the debate MUST be a long-term strategic goal.

DEFICITS/DEBT: Bush has handed Kerry a killer issue but Kerry seems incapable of exploiting it. He still speaks in abstractions about record deficits. But who knows what a billion let a lone a trillion is? This is why I've pushed for a visual approach... to SHOW voters what Bush's 04 deficit of 468 Billion is.... and it amounts to a pile of cash some 430' high atop a regulation football field. This could make many Bush voters question what he's doing. Another example, tt took the nation 205 years to get to the first 1.7 Trillion in debt. Bush got us there in less than 4 years. If Kerry can't provide the honest Bush deficit figures because he's also using the deceptive "unified budget" instead of the TRUE indicator of the deficit: the on-budget revenue deficit... then Kerry can talk of the debt Bush is adding in FY04. He can have his cake and eat it too.

SO WE DON'T HAVE TO FIGHT THEM HERE: This is one of Bush's oldest lines. It sounds like he has a plan to fight terrorism when Iraq proved it's a disaster. Given the arbitrary nature of Bush's "gathering threat" test... the US can easily end up creating more anti-American hatred. Where once we mostly had to worry about radical jihadists.... now Bush has added to the list of those who want to kill Americans... Iraqi nationalists, former Ba'athists, families of those we've wrongly killed, followers of radical clerics, families seeking revenge for "collateral damage", and who knows how many others throughout the Islamic world. The simple fact is despite what Bush implies, we don't have ANY way of knowing whether we've disrupted ANY terrorist plans to attack the US. Common sense would suggest that Bin Ladin would prefer Bush to Kerry since Bush is inflaming the Islamic world providing more recruits.

87 BILLION: I'm still in shock that Kerry still is having problems with Bush's distortions of his 87 Billion vote. Kerry's twice repeated line in the debates about making a mistake how he talked about the war left the issue of the actual vote open. Why couldn't Kerry during the debate just say "Of course I voted for funding the troops. But there were two votes. One was fiscally responsible.... the other wasn't. I voted for the bill that was fiscally responsible but the GOP would not let it pass."

SOCIAL SECURITY: Bush has been saying of late that Social Security is in desperate need of reform.. that he's the person to do it, not Kerry. Yet it's Bush's irresponsible tax cuts are most responsible for putting Social Security at risk. Kerry should NOT let Bush get away with pretending to want to fix a program he's spent four years trying to sabotage.

WHO PROLONGED THE VIETNAM WAR: Despite what the rabid Swifties claim it wasn't Kerry and the anti-war movement that prolonged the Vietnam War... where thousands more were killed and wounded in action and where POWs were kept longer in prison. it was Nixon and Ford. If the anti-war movement had its way, the US would have been out of Vietnam in the late 60's... not 1975. John O'Neill and the Swifties are so pathologically consumed with their hatred of Kerry they warp history to perpetuate that hatred.

THE SUPREME COURT: Kerry's not explaining the REAL danger of Bush appointing more justices to the USSC. Kerry's not exposing Bush when he claims he only wants USSC justices who will "interpret the Constitution". This isn't a quest for political neutrality. It's code that he supports Scalia's radical doctrine of originalism in which Scalia claims to have a monopoly on the Framer's original intent. Scalia believes the Constitution is "dead"... that there's no room to interpret it. He believes that there's a set number of rights.... and his job is to PREVENT the establishment of new rights not enumerated in the Constitution... rights such as the freedom to choose, etc. Scalia's doctrine directly contradicts the 9th amendment which is open ended on the matter of rights: "The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people."

[ulTRAX]

1. BUSH WAS FIRST TO FUND STEM CELL RESEARCH?

This is another area where Kerry can improve his message.

The Right claims Bush is the first president to fund stem cell research. The implication is that other presidents refused to.

They probably would have but the science wasn't promising enough until about the year 2000. So technically it seems to be correct that Bush is the first President to fund stem cell research... and in the process was also the first to try to sabotage it to satisfy his religious Right constituency.
Background: http://www.laskerfoundation.org/news/stemcell/history.html

Stem Cell Research
History of the Research

In the mid 1800s, scientists began to recognize that cells were the basic building blocks of life, and that cells gave rise to other cells. In the early 1900s, European scientists realized that all blood cells came from one particular "stem cell." While "bone marrow transplants"—actually a transplant of stem cells—are currently used for a wide variety of diseases, and fetal nerve cells have been transplanted experimentally into the brains of people with Parkinson's disease for the past ten years, it wasn't until very recently that sources of cells that might be used to regenerate other organs became available. In 1998, researchers at the University of Wisconsin led by James Thomson isolated and grew stem cells from human embryos, and researchers from Johns Hopkins University led by John Gearhart did the same for human germ cells. In 1999 and 2000, researchers began to find that manipulation of adult mouse tissues could sometimes yield previously unsuspected cell types; for example, that some bone marrow cells could be turned into nerve or liver cells and that stem cells found in the brain appear to be able to form other kinds of cells.