| Topic: |
Science > Prophecies-Of-Nostradamus |
| User: |
"Marvin The Paranoid Android" |
| Date: |
09 Jul 2004 08:06:10 AM |
| Object: |
Kerry's Celebrity Fund-Raiser Is a Huge Bash |
Kerry's Celebrity Fund-Raiser Is a Huge Bash
By JODI WILGOREN
Published: July 9, 2004
star-studded salute to Senators John Kerry and John Edwards Thursday night
at Radio City Music Hall slid into an unsparing skewering of the Bush
administration, with actors and comedians denouncing the president as a
liar, making off-color jokes about his name, and accusing him of risking
soldiers' lives for political gain.
The racy Hollywood humor and harsh attacks were a sharp shift from the
relentlessly positive focus on American values the new Democratic ticket
has been trying to maintain this week.
"Texas Bandito, how much money did you put in your pocket today?" John
Mellencamp crooned in a country ballad. "You better split from that Texas
Bandito, he's made this world unsafe today. Our thoughts are not free from
the Texas Bandito, he's just another cheap thug that sacrifices our young."
In a two-and-a-half hour gala that raised $7.5 million, a record for a
single event, Chevy Chase poked fun at the president's pronunciation of
"nuclear" and "terrorist" and said Mr. Bush had invaded Iraq "just so he
could be called a wartime president." Paul Newman decried "tax cuts for
wealthy thugs like me" as "borderline criminal."
The comedian John Leguizamo, who is half Puerto Rican, said the notion of
Hispanics supporting Republicans was "like roaches for Raid." And Whoopi
Goldberg, after joking about refusing to submit her material to campaign
censors, made an extended sexual pun on the president's surname.
Then the Academy-Award-winning actress Meryl Streep asked which candidates
Jesus might support.
"I wondered to myself during 'Shock and Awe,' I wondered which of the
megaton bombs Jesus, our president's personal savior, would have personally
dropped on the sleeping families of Baghdad?" Ms. Streep said.
Steve Schmidt, a Bush campaign spokesman, denounced the event as "a
Hollywood fund-raiser filled with enough hate and vitriol to make Michael
Moore blush."
After the concert, Mr. Kerry's press secretary, David Wade, said,
"Obviously John Kerry and John Edwards do not agree with everything that
was said tonight," adding: "Performers have a right to speak their minds
even when we don't agree with everything they say. That's the freedom John
Kerry put his life on the line to defend."
But unlike one of Mr. Kerry's vanquished primary rivals, Howard Dean, who
denounced racial humor and profanity at one of his own fundraisers in New
York, Mr. Edwards and Mr. Kerry hardly veered from their script when they
mounted the stage at the end of the extravaganza, looking more subdued than
they had all week.
"This campaign will be a celebration of real American values," Mr. Edwards
promised, saying that voters "deserve a president who knows the difference
between what is right and what is wrong."
Mr. Kerry, inviting his and Mr. Edwards's adult children onstage for a
sing-along of "This Land Is Your Land," told the crowd that "every single
performer" on the bill had "conveyed to you the heart and soul of our
country."
Campaign aides said the performers would not allow broadcast journalists to
record the concert.
Postponed from last month because of Ronald Reagan's death, the concert
brought 6,200 people, paying $250 to $25,000 each, to the historic hall,
beating the $6.8 million haul from a parallel gala last month in Los
Angeles featuring Barbra Streisand, Willie Nelson and Billy Crystal. The
take will be split based on limits on direct contributions to candidates:
about $5 million will go to the Democratic National Committee and about $2
million to the campaign.
President Bush's best night, bringing in $4 million, was also in New York
City, on June 23. His record day netted $5.3 million from a pair of
fundraisers, in Chicago and Cincinnati, last September.
On an extensive bill featuring the Dave Matthews Band and Jon Bon Jovi,
Mary J. Blige and John Fogerty, Ms. Goldberg stood out for her brash
assessment of the Bush administration, as well as her teasing of the
Democratic standard bearers.
"Where's the kid? Where's the young Mr. Edwards?" she said at the start,
ignoring the questions Republicans have raised about his age and
experience. "He looks like he's about 18," she said later, joking that she
would check his identification before serving him a drink.
(Ms. Goldberg's was the only riff Mr. Kerry addressed directly, saying of
his new political partner, "I have a man, Whoopi, who through his lifetime
of experience ")
Wyclef Jean, the Haitian hip-hop star, broke the Kerry campaigns unwritten
rule against uttering French, to ward off Republican caricatures, with a
multilingual rap, one of several songs whose lyrics were rewritten for the
occasion.
"Instead of spending billions on the war, I can use that money so I can
feed the poor," sang Mr. Jean, whose tie bore a donkey in an Uncle Sam hat
.. "I know some soldiers that sleep but they can't dream, wake up with
dreams, sounds of M-16s."
The actress Jessica Lange described the upcoming election as a "question of
conscience."
"Are we going to continue to follow a self-serving regime of deceipt,
hypocrisy and belligerence?" Ms. Lange asked the crowd. "Or are we after
four disastrous years going to take a step toward our true responsibility
as leader of the free world?"
The concert capped the second day of joint campaigning by the newly minted
Democratic ticket, part of a multimedia effort that included an hourlong
interview with Mr. Kerry and his wife, Teresa Heinz Kerry, on "Larry King
Live." Asked about warnings on Thursday about the possibility of a Qaeda
attack this year, Mr. Kerry told Mr. King that he had not yet had time to
be briefed on the subject. He also said that he does not plan to see Mr.
Moore's anti-Bush polemic, "Fahrenheit 9/11."
The day dawned with a classic tarmac rally in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., near
the epicenter of the vote-counting controversy of the 2000 election.
Continuing his running commentary on Mr. Edwards's children, Mr. Kerry told
the crowd that 6-year-old Emma Claire and her brother Jack, 4, are "really
good at math."
"They really know how to count," he said. "So I've given them a special
duty in this election. We're sending Jack and Emma Claire down here to help
those Republicans in West Palm Beach count those votes."
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| User: "Marty Feldman" |
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| Title: Re: Kerry's Celebrity Fund-Raiser Is a Huge Bash |
11 Jul 2004 08:21:45 PM |
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Marvin The Paranoid Android <marv@HeartOfGold.com> wrote in message news:<ccm594024dl@news1.newsguy.com>...
Kerry's Celebrity Fund-Raiser Is a Huge Bash
By JODI WILGOREN
here's another wilgoren piece:
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/03/politics/campaign/03VALU.html?pagewanted=2&ei=5090&en=167b8d33af9415ae&ex=1246507200&partner=rssuserland
Kerry Invoking 'Values' Theme to Frame Issues
By JODI WILGOREN
The New York Times
Published: July 3, 2004
CHICAGO, July 2 — Forty-eight minutes into a rambling speech about
education, health care, jobs and equal opportunity here the other
morning, Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts went off-script to sum up
his White House quest in a simple sentence. "In the end it's about
values," he told a conference of the Rev. Jesse L. Jackson's
Rainbow/PUSH Coalition.
Mr. Kerry, the expected Demo-cratic presidential nominee, had used
similar language to dispatch the first two queries at a news
conference the day before. "I'm optimis- tic about how America could
live up to our values," he said when asked about a new Republican
Internet advertisement.
A moment later, he said of the Supreme Court decision concerning
detainees that he wished the Bush administration had done "what was in
keeping with the values and spirit of our country."
Last Saturday, Mr. Kerry used the V-word no fewer than eight times in
a 36-minute speech to Hispanic leaders and next Wednesday he is
scheduled to give a speech on his "plan to restore America's values to
the White House."
It sounds the same whether he is discussing the minimum wage or
immigration, foreign policy or his own biography: Senator Kerry is
increasingly adopting a traditionally Republican refrain to give his
campaign — and himself — grounding and context in broad moral terms.
This is a shift from Mr. Kerry's pitch during the primaries — when
several of his opponents, most particularly Senator Joseph I.
Lieberman of Connecticut, spoke frequently of family, values and faith
— but it follows President Bill Clinton's 1996 playbook.
[yeah, but did anyone use a glorious samurai story to drive home the
point in a way that spreads and sticks? :) just for the record, i
truly believe that "secular" values like fairness and honesty are 1)
sorely lacking in a traumatized iraq, or any country with centuries
old traditions of corruption (btw, i first identified corruption as
inhibiting democracy in third world nations and came to fairness,
honesty, merit as their antidotes, second. in other words,
reverse-engineering was how i tackled it.) 2) the bedrock values which
allowed america and other great democracies in the world to flourish
into preeminence 3) these very values that the bush admin raped in
their march to war, and also permitted an incompetent like bush to
take power. that's my "unified theory" to build a democracies in the
middle east and africa, and to defeat bush in november. :) or i could
be just another delusional poster on usenet. i report, you decide! ]
Mr. Kerry also occasionally invokes God, either when talking about his
own recovery from prostate cancer or to say "God bless" soldiers, for
example. But the focus on values may be less an appeal to the
religious right, a constituency seen as a critical part of Mr. Bush's
coalition, than outreach to what Democratic strategists call "secular
values voters" - people concerned about balancing work and family,
opportunities for their children, and America's leadership in the
world.
Democratic strategists say they believe President Bush is vulnerable
among these voters because he no longer emphasizes the "compassionate
conservative" theme of his 2000 campaign, and because of how the Iraq
war has been conducted.
With this year's election expected to turn in large measure on
external events - a boom in the economy, say, or an unraveling in Iraq
- winning votes through an appeal to values seems more stable. Kerry
aides also say the increased use of values-laden remarks signals a new
phase in Mr. Kerry's presentation, in which he explains his policies
as extensions of his convictions.
"Americans speak in values terms, so when you use the values language,
it's much easier to connect with ordinary people," said Al From, chief
executive of the centrist Democratic Leadership Council, which listed
a belief in "the moral and cultural values that most Americans share"
in its founding document in 1990, a position that Mr. Clinton used
effectively in his campaign. "People look for grounding. They want to
see what's at the core of somebody who's running for president."
Mark Penn, who helped develop Mr. Clinton's values strategy in 1996,
said a recent survey of likely voters that he conducted for an
independent group of Democrats found that one in five said values
would be the most important issue to them this fall. That is fewer
than those who named the economy or security, but still significant.
The polling also showed that Mr. Bush has a significant advantage with
such voters, but that Mr. Kerry could make inroads, Mr. Penn said. He
noted that even though Mr. Bush led Mr. Kerry among such voters, Mr.
Kerry held a slight advantage when the voters were asked which
candidate "shares your values.'' Mr. Kerry performed better on
tolerance, responsibility and compassion; Mr. Bush had the edge on
leadership, strength and moral character.
Surveys of voters leaving the polls in 1996 and 2000 showed Mr.
Clinton and former Vice President Al Gore performed about equally
among the voters who agreed with Democratic positions on issues like
abortion or gun control. But Mr. Clinton did better than Mr. Gore
among those voters who disagreed. That makes Democrats think they can
win over people in part by the way they frame the discussion.
Mr. Penn said the audience Democrats hoped a values theme would appeal
to were not those affiliated with the religious right, but voters -
mainly women - whose choices were guided by "compassion,
responsibility, honoring your parents and protecting your kids."
[music to my ears.]
That is whom Mr. Kerry sought to reach on Friday in Cloquet, Minn.,
when he promised to "honor the values that built our country and
strengthened our communities,'' listing family, responsibility and
service as "values that are rooted in the heartland.'' And those are
the people he was trying to address on Monday in Baltimore, when he
characterized the election as "a values choice," one between tax cuts
for people earning more than $200,000 a year or financing for the
Youth Build neighborhood program he was visiting. "My value is with
these kids and with the future of this city," Mr. Kerry said.
Those were also the ears he sought when he told the Hispanic leaders
last Saturday that illegal immigrants dying in the desert or working
in poor conditions did not "reflect our values as a country built by
immigrants." The same ones that he hoped heard him promise, last week
in Denver, to pursue scientific advances "guided in our standards by
our morals and our values."
Kathleen Hall Jamieson, director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center
at the University of Pennsylvania, said that what was new in Mr.
Kerry's campaigning was not the substance but the terminology -
Democrats, she said, had more typically spoken of "rights'' while
Republicans invoke values.
[this is true, but after decades of use, "rights" has too much
baggage.]
For Mr. Kerry, Ms. Jamieson said, "values are rebutting the charge
that he's flip-flopping, because they suggest that he's anchored in
moral principle." Stephanie Cutter, Mr. Kerry's communications
director, said that many of the values references recently were the
candidate's own ad-libbed flourishes.
A senior consultant to the campaign said he had urged Mr. Kerry to
share more of himself, to explain how his accomplishments and
positions were rooted in his background.
"We gave them the core structure of who this guy is, but now we're
filling in the texture of him," said the consultant, who spoke on the
condition of anonymity so as not to detract attention from Mr. Kerry.
"O.K., you're for health care - why are you for health care? 'It's the
right thing to do. It's a value I've learned.' What out of your life
story really answers why you are doing these things and what you're
about?"
That process is reminiscent of President Clinton's 1996 re-election
effort when aides revised his message after finding his speeches rife
in programmatic detail. Thus, overhauling the welfare system became a
discussion about the value of work. Balanced budgets were framed as
the value of living within means.
"We went back and we stated all the programs in terms of the values
they represented or were trying to achieve," Mr. Penn recalled.
Mr. Clinton's second-term struggle concerning his affair with Monica
Lewinsky and subsequent impeachment hurt the Democrats' credibility on
value issues and let Mr. Bush step in promising to "restore honor and
dignity to the White House."
In turn, Mr. Kerry now vows to restore the nation's esteem in the
world, as he tries to frame 35 years in government as "a lifetime of
service and strength" rather than a lengthy list of legislation.
"Both of my parents, like yours, taught me values, they taught me the
value of service," Senator Kerry told 3,000 members of the Service
Employees International Union at their convention last week in San
Francisco. "You better tell this administration that we're fed up and
their time is up, we're changing the value system in this country
that's broken."
[way to go, wilgoren. i love this piece.]
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