Kerry Wins

[rndmprsn]

for the doubters...read on...

GOTV...polls aint going to win or lose this for us.


http://www.commondreams.org/views04/1030-27.htm

Kerry Wins
by Nancy Snow

Just days ago my students asked me to go out on a limb and predict the presidential election results. Since I teach a course this fall called “Political Communication and Elections” it was like catnip to this political animal. Cautioning that this was neither an endorsement nor do I have a margin of error of three percentage points, I said that my gut tells me Kerry will win. My class seems evenly divided between pro-Bush and pro-Kerry supporters (although I haven’t asked them specifically), so there was a vocal rush of excitement from some of the students. Here’s what I base my very unscientific conclusions on:

Kerry is starting to pull away with women. Women, the so-called security Moms and “W is for Women” camp, were on the Bush side right through September, but Kerry dominated in the debates, where he showed an ability to be tough on terror, despite his L word (that’s liberal, not lesbian) tag. But Kerry didn’t just stick with toughness and hunting skills. Unlike Bush, who spotlighted security on 9/11 and getting rid of Saddam, Kerry framed security within a larger landscape picture of domestic security issues, including job security, healthcare, and education...

Kerry is wooing younger voters. There’s no question that younger voters between the ages of 18-35 are registering in numbers exceeding the last contested presidential election of 2000. In my fourteen years of college teaching, I’ve never seen students quite so motivated and fired up emotionally about their respective candidate...

If polls say it’s a tie the weekend before, this favors the challenger. President Bush better hope he has the luck of the “buck stops here” man from Missouri, Harry Truman, because you’d have to go back to 1948 to locate the last president who had such a 50/50 split in positive/negative favorability in the summer before who managed to eke out a win in November...

Finally, as for Bin Laden’s late-breaking video appearance and its possible impact on the election, there’s no question that Bin Laden uses a Bush-led America as a recruitment tool in his al-Qaida ideology and movement. A Bush win keeps Bin Laden’s credibility in tact with those parts of the world that loathe the United States because of its government leadership. Bin Laden’s video does serve, however, to bring President Bush’s main security argument for protecting us from shadowy terrorists to the forefront of people’s minds as they vote November 2nd. In the end, the American people are going to vote for change at the top and won’t let some far-distant terrorist reinforce his recruiting status.