9/29/04 Theaters ready for anti-Michael Moore movie
While there is no distributor yet for the anti-Michael Moore movie, Celsius 41.11, David Bossie, the movie financer and producer who's also president of Citizens United, says that he's already getting calls from theaters that want it. Bossie, speaking to U.S. News after Tuesday night's Georgetown premiere of the pro-Bush, anti-Kerry movie, said that he hopes to have a distributor by the end of the week. "We've got theaters coming to us," he said. The movie aims to take on Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11 and several charges that Bush is a bad commander in chief who lied about Iraq's terrorist intentions. "The purpose of it was not for yucks," said one of the movie's stars, former Justice official Barbara Comstock. Bossie said that he backed the movie because he wanted to answer the "hatred, fear, and anger" in Moore's movie. The premiere attracted several hundred supporters of Citizens United who cheered the movie and hissed when Kerry's and CBS anchor Dan Rather's images were shown. A follow-up party at Georgetown's Sequoia Restaurant attracted many of those in the documentary, conservative leaders, and press. Check it out: http://65.36.166.137
9/23/04 No rest for the (campaign) weary
Republican and Democratic campaign aides, lobbyists, and congressional officials say they learned a valuable lesson from the 2000 election: Forget about making post-election vacation plans. "I don't know anybody who's got plans," says a key Bush campaign surrogate. "Who knows what state we'll be living in at Christmas?" In 2000, political aides flooded Florida for what turned into a very long vote-count process, and many had to cancel their family vacations as the two sides fought it out. And this year everyone is already setting time aside to repeat the experience, in Ohio or Pennsylvania or wherever the vote tallies are close, say aides on both sides.
9/22/04 Who benefits from a terrorism attack?
It's a question nobody wants to ask, but it's the dark cloud over the election: If there is a terrorist attack near Election Day, who would benefit, President Bush or Sen. John Kerry? Democratic and Republican strategists think they have the answer: probably Bush. They tell Whispers that they do not think that the nation's voters would follow Spain's lead and junk Bush if the bomb lands. Instead, they are telling their campaigns that it's more likely that the country would question U.S. intelligence but eventually rally around the White House in the event of a single attack. Unclear is the reaction to several domestic attacks, which would open the White House to criticism that it has lost control. However, officials don't expect a series of attacks. "Spain is not the model," said a Bush strategist who has seen polling on the issue. He said that the more likely model is 9/11, wherein the nation turned to the commander in chief to take charge and retaliate. The issue has hung over both the Kerry and Bush campaigns, but no staffers from either team said that they are making contingency plans on how to react if an attack comes in late October, as some intelligence officials fear.
9/15/04 Nader turns on Kerry
The election is over in Ralph Nader's view, but his goal of helping Sen. John Kerry is not in the picture. In fact, the independent who once offered to join with Kerry to defeat Bush has given up on the Democratic candidate. At a breakfast meeting with a handful of reporters, Nader said that at every turn, Kerry went the wrong way and is ceding the election to Bush. What's more, said the Reform Party candidate, Kerry isn't listening to him. "I keep telling the Democrats to look at our website. That's your road map," said Nader. Not shy about claiming he has the answer to electoral success, Nader said that Kerry has made the mistake of building a "corporate" campaign that is adopting GOP positions and rejecting the old traditional Democratic Party positions aimed at the poor and downtrodden. The Kerry campaign, he said, "is taking the corporate poison pill" by inviting lobbyists and businessmen to run the campaign and ignoring old party groups like African-Americans. His is a bitter view of the Kerry campaign, the result of frustration that the Democrats have ignored his advice and set up legal hurdles to his bid to get on state presidential election ballots, and the effort by Republicans to help his campaign by enlisting volunteers to get ballot access signatures for him.
9/1/04 Electoral College swing to Bush
Shocked but happy that Sen. John Kerry has floundered in the polls leading up to the GOP convention, new Bush-Cheney internal polling shows that President Bush has turned around his Electoral College deficit and is now leading by a few votes more than the 270 needed to win. Bush aides interviewed in New York said that the prez now has 288 electoral votes and is surging in even more states. What's different from 2000? Bush is also leading Kerry by 1 to 3 percent in likely voter polling, meaning he could win the popular vote, too. And the change isn't just a Bush-Cheney vision. Pollster Tony Fabrizio has weighed the shift in the Electoral College and comes to this conclusion: Kerry's bad August, coupled with the swift boat controversy, has pushed Bush into the lead. "During the last two weeks of the swift boat controversy," he says in an E-mail, "there has been a dramatic 145-electoral-vote swing away from Kerry/Edwards to Bush/Cheney."
