Just another nerd.
Associated Press and others now reporting that Kerry called Bush privately to concede and congratualte the president on his win. Kerry will give a concession speech at around 1 p.m. Eastern Time.
That’s going to seriously piss off all the left-liberals who took Edwards’ promise to count every vote as a sign that Kerry was prepared to turn Ohio into the next Florida.
But it is clearly the right thing to do, and it is to Kerry’s credit that he is gracious in losing.
All signs now point to Kerry delivering a concession speech later this afternoon.
A lot of liberal-left blogs and web sites are deluding themselves that the provisional ballots in Ohio could put Kerry over the top. The problem is this — yes, in 2000 something like 85 to 90 percent of provisional ballots counted as votes. But Ohio’s operating under a federal law now, and shortly before the election a federal judge ruled that provisional ballots cast by legitimate voters at the wrong precinct could not be counted. A huge number of those provisional ballots are going to be people who weren’t on voter rolls because they showed up at the wrong precinct. In 2000 Ohio’s state law allowed those to be counted; in 2004, federal law is going to prohibit them.
It’s over, folks.
The only remaining question is whether or not Kerry will be able to get through is concession speech without mentioning Vietnam, and whether Bush will be able to give a victory speech without mentioning that winning an election is really hard work.
If you’d asked me a few months ago, I’d have said that Bush’s chances of winning Michigan were about the same as the Detroit Lion’s winning three straight road games this season. Ooops.
National Review notes that Kerry is going to be campaigning here on Sunday or Monday. National Review quotes a Bush campaign volunteer as saying internal polls show Bush ahead in Michigan, which they pretty much were guaranteed to say regardless, but Kerry making a last minute stop here is a bit odd given that it should be a shoo-in for Kerry.
Or to put it another way, if Kerry can’t win Michigan he has little chance of capturing the presidency. This is a state that has lost thousands of manufacturing jobs, is heavily union and has a substantial urban minority population. If Kerry can’t win in this state, he’s going to have a horrible election night.
Kerry’s probably coming here late to try to boost turnout. Bottom line — if he can get heavy turnout in Wayne County (Detroit), Kerry’s going to win. If people think he’s faltering or don’t find him that compelling and don’t turn out, he’s going to lose.
And unlike the 2000 election, there isn’t any major contentious statewide ballot issue to drive voter turnout (in 2000 there was hotly disputed school choice proposal). This year the only major statewide ballots are related to gambling and gay marriage, neither of which has caused anywhere near the level of controversy that the school choice measure did.
Robert Harris is apparently lowering himself to agree with an analysis that John Kerry plagiarized portions of his 1997 book, The New War: The Web of Crime That Threatens America’s National Security. The basic charge is that some sentences in Kerry’s book bear a marked resemblance to sentences that appeared in news reports about the topic of the book, money laundering.
Yawn. Kerry wasn’t writing as a scholar, but rather wrote a popular book designed for a general audience on money laundering. Harris hits him Kerry for slightly rewriting a couple sentences that he picked up from a news report in the Philadelphia Inquirer. Big deal — major newspapers do this all the time. The major syndicated news companies regularly runs articles which are little more than rewrites of their competitors stories.
If it is good enough for the Associated Press or the BBC, why not for John Kerry? At best Kerry simply engaged in poor attribution, which is hardly unheard of for non-scholarly authors and hardly worth the space the Sun devotes to it.
Source:
Researcher Alleges Potential Plagiarism in 11 Passages of Kerry’s Writings. Josh Gerstein, New York Sun, October 26, 2004.
Yet another example of Boing! Boing! letting its anti-Bush knee jerk reaction get the better of it. Bush is scheduled on Wednesday to give what his campaign calls a major speech. The Bush campaign is making much of the fact that Bush was going to talk about medical liability but is now going to talk about terrorism and the economy.
Boing! Boing!’s Mark Frauenfelder goes nuts with this extremely bizarre post,
Will Kerry get equal time to respond to President Bush’s last-minute speech
In an effort to halt his deteriorating ratings, President Bush has announced that’ll he’ll be giving a major speech on Wednesday. “The president is said to be eager to rebut Kerry’s attacks on [the] issues.” I’m imagine he is, since Kerry won’t be able to respond. Will Kerry be given equal time on the networks?
What the hell does that mean? Kerry won’t be able to respond? What, is Bush going to have Dick Cheney sit on Kerry to prevent him from responding? Of course Kerry will be able to respond, and you’ll likely see dueling soundbites on the 6:30 p.m. news on Wednesday or Thursday.
Fraunfelder seems under the false impression that broadcast networks will carry Bush’s speech live just because he calls it a “major speech.” Give me a f—ing break — the broadcast media never runs campaign speeches live.
Kids, this is your brain. And, this is your brain on reflexive Bush bashing.
Update
Sometimes I feel like I’m the only one watching television instead of blogging. A lot has been made of the fact that two cable news channels — CNN and MSNBC — chose to run Bush’s speech live (I’m sure all 12 people watching MSNBC in the middle of the day were thrilled by that decision).
Big deal — cable news channels regularly run live feeds of campaign speeches by Kerry or Bush, and if you bill the appearance as a “major speech” that is not just a standard recapitulation of the stump speech, one or more of the cable news channels will probably run the whole damn thing live as long as it’s a slow news day. On September 20, for example, CNN ran a major Kerry speech on foreign policy live beginning at 10 a.m. Similarly, a number of the cable channels ran Kerry’s midnight speech on the last day of the Republican National Convention.
What would have been inappropriate, would have been if CBS, ABC or NBC had interrupted their daytime broadcasts to air Bush’s campaign speech live, since they don’t usually run campaign speeches from either candidate live. And, of course, they didn’t because they can’t build an audience based on the half dozen cats whose owners accidentally leave the television on and tuned to MSNBC during the day.
And, of course, the Kerry campaign did have a chance to respond to Bush’s speech. The broadcast networks featured reports with excerpts from Bush’s speech and from a speech that John Edwards gave the same day. In fact, the coverage on most of the networks was overwhelmingly negative (as it should be) toward Bush due to testimony about the CIA report finding that Saddam Hussein’s WMD program had ended several years after the end of the first Persian Gulf War.
A new Newsweek poll has George W. Bush and John Kerry essentially tied after Bush’s poor debate performance.
I bet the Bush folks really regret agreeing to three debates now.
But, of course, the important polls are those in the a handful of states that are actually going to be competitive. It’ll be interesting to see how polls in Florida and Ohio look at the end of the week.