Mark A. Kilmer (the weblog)

Anne Northrup, the Representative from Kentucky — “an adopted mother myself” — talked about the value of adopting children. She introduced a vid about the joys of adoption.

“People of compassion.”

This one is not going to happen, but it was suggested to me as a possibility. It is…

McCain/Giuliani is the GOP ticket in 2008.

McCain will be 76 in 2012, so he’ll step aside and let Rudy carry it that year and in 2016

All things being equal, the ticket would be formidable; the Republicans would first have to realize, though, that the complexion of their party would be forever changed.

(Just kicking things around…)

Texas Senator Kay Bailey Hutchinson gaveled the session to order, followed by the colors presented by a group called Order of the Purple Heart and a Vietnam veterans organization.

The Gideon and Susan from MTV News introduced the winner of their “Stand up and Holla” competition, a young woman named Princilla Smith, 20.

She was a tall{ish), African American with a young but serious demeanor. She mentioned that a candidate from another party had used his convention to speak of an Arkansas town, “a place called Hope.” She wanted speak of another Arkansas town, where she lived: “A place called Wynne.”

She objected to her generation being called Generation X, as it made them seem as if they had no goals, nothing to offer. She rejected “that label. We are Generation X-ample.”

She challenged all generations to be the greatest generation.

Then they again began the roll call to nominate the President, to conclude tomorrow night for effect. As CBS anchor Dan Rather told KDKA TV-2 in Pittsburgh this afternoon: “It is a TV dinner which tastes like potatoes and meat.” (Something to that effect. You know how he is.)

Pennsylvania, with 75 votes, put President Bush over the 1255 needed to nominate. The rest of the roll call, to be concluded Wednesday, is just for show. Well, we’ve got to fulfill the book.

Get this one. JF Kerry is a champion of internationalism’s causes and organizations. The World Trade Organization (WTO) is a key internationalist organization. The WTO applied sanctions on $150-million of U.S. exports, and Kerry has accused President Bush of failing “to stand up for American companies and workers at the WTO.”

Kerry the internationalist has accused the man he termed a unilateralist of failing because he did not unilaterally object to the decision of an internationalist body. When President Bush objected to the U.N. Security Council’s refusal to enforce their own internationalist resolution (1441) and grabbed a coalition of the willing and enforced the resolution, Kerry took a different tack.

This differs from most of his positions while serving in the Senate, but we’re not to talk about that.

Radio talker Hugh Hewitt interviewed Karl Rove this morning, on the transcript is on his blog.

Here’s a sample:

ROVE: “I think it’s [Kerry’s attacks on him] sad and demeaning. I also think that it is a sign of something deeper and I hate to be personal about it, but Senator Kerry stood up on a stage in Pittsburgh and attacked me saying that I’d gone to great lengths to avoid service in Vietnam and then on the flight between Pittsburgh and Philadelphia at his next rally, a reporter asked him what do you know about Carl [sic] Rove’s draft status and he said I don’t know anything. So, here he stood up and took my good name as a cheap campaign ploy and knocked me around a little bit and admitted that he didn’t have a bit of evidence or knowledge how old I was or where I was during the Vietnam . . when he was in Vietnam, I was in high school.”

Here’s the story from April about the Kerry attack, and here’s the quote from that story:

“I’m tired of Karl Rove and Dick Cheney and a bunch of people who went out of their way to avoid their chance to serve when they had the chance. I went (to Vietnam). I’m not going listen to them talk to me about patriotism.”

Rove was a senior at Olympus High School in Utah in 1968, the year of Kerry’s Christmas “near-Cambodia” experience.

I am a decidedly partisan commentator, but I try to be an objective reporter and analyst, though I present the story in my own terms. I have reported that last night looked good for the President from all angles, but it would be foolish to have expected anything different from an event planned and conducted by Republicans for the purpose of reelection with a feeble opposition low on substance. I’m serious: what do they have?

Let’s have the other side. I commend to your attention to a column by the chief political commentator of the SLATE online teen magazine, What does 9/11 tell us about Bush? Nothing. It tells us that Kerry served in Vietnam, Bush did not, thus everything Bush does is cowardly. (”Living the past,” trying to use it to soak the present and future.) As the premise for the non-sequitur, we find a few vindictive and a few gullible assumptions.

The opposition has nothing.

I noted when he was talking to the American Legion this AM that the President seemed confidant. He gave an interview with Rush Limbaugh this afternoon, and he sounded even more cocksure than he had earlier. He was on a roll, he felt.

He mentioned to Limbaugh that he had spoken to British Prime Minister Tony Blair this morning, and one wonders if he didn’t tell Blair that he was going to campaign using the rationale for the Iraq war.

He said that he decided, based on the intelligence, that Saddam was a threat. Congress decided, based on the intelligence, that Saddam was a threat. The U.N. Security council decided, based on the intelligence, that Saddam was a threat. And Saddam, he reiterated, was a threat.

When he told Matt Lauer that “I don’t think we can win” the war on terror, he said, he was pointing out that it is not a convention war which will end with a peace treaty. The President faulted his articulation.

He said that he’s getting huge crowds in “the hinterlands, the heartland,” and he wonders if “something is happening which will lead to victory in November.” He had to have been pumped by Rudy Giuliani’s speech last night, and this seems to have carried him into a confidant, upbeat mode of campaigning.

This tends to be contagious, and Kerry cannot touch it.

As the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth launch a new ad about JF Kerry tossing out his war medals — “Symbols, like the heroes they represent, are meant to be respected” — President Bush addressed the American Legion in Nashville. Two lines in particular caught my attention:

We’ve seen weeks, months, when the press has piled on the President with relentless energy. You heart their own commentators talk of “two weeks of bad press for Bush,” etc.

Analyst Charlie Cook defined it in his e-mailed “Convention Dispatch” of this morning:

A week when the [media] focus is on the economy and jobs, or on Iraq and casualties, the management of the war, and weapons of mass destruction is a good week for Kerry and a bad week for Bush. When the focus is on almost anything else, it’s very likely to be a good week for Bush and a bad week for Kerry.”

This is true. When the media focus is on the economy, it is portrayed as a Herber Hoover redux. When it is on Iraq and casualties, it is always on mutant uprisings, hostages, and the war dead not in relative terms. When the focus is on the management of the war, it is always from the Kerry perspective. If it is one weapons of mass destruction, their supposed existence is given as the sole reason for the invasion and the President is depicted as a liar who raved about it to the American people when he knew there weren’t any. So when something distracts the media from their versions of the stories, it is a good week for Bush.

“When the focus is on almost anything else, it’s very likely to be a good week for Bush and a bad week for Kerry.” Translated: “When the focus is on anything regarding Kerry, it’s very likely to be a good week for Bush and a bad week for Kerry.”

Still before 9p ET:

This evening, Imam Izak-ei Mu’eed Pasha, chaplain of the NYPD, began his invocation by quoting President Reagan. With honor.

Some pretty good singers, Broadway-types, performed a medly.

Then a girl imitating a reporter “interviewed” Convention CEO Bill Harris. She pretended to be getting a message over her earpiece then said to Harris: “I’m told that you have an important announcement to make.”

Harris: “Live from New York… It’s the Republican National Convention!”

With the Saturday Night Live theme wailing in the background, a Don Pardo imitator went through the usual opening… “with Rudy Giuliani… John McCain… Zell Miller…”

I think you had to be there.

Ed Gillespie ran onto the stage and said a bit, and they began the nominating roll call — alphabetically, as per Rule 36. They’re going to stop it and finish Wednesday night or Thursday.

C-SPAN had the delegate count on the bottom, with spots for votes accorded to Bush and to “Others.” It was a cute touch, confers an aura of authenticity to the show.

There were even girls on stage behind a desk scribbling on paper, as if counting the votes. Heck, they probably were.

What a show.

Eric Lindholm (Viking Pundit) is certain that Wednesday “will be the single worst day for the disintegrating Kerry campaign.” Kerry will address the American Legion, of which he is a member despite his 1971 written oath, and Zell Miller will addres the Republican National Convention.

This caught my eye from CNN:

Reaching out to these two very specific but different audiences won’t be all that easy because what often appeals to moderate swing voters (remember those suburban “soccer moms”) is poison to the conservative base — and vice versa. The swing voters, by definition, want to see what President Bush four years ago called a “compassionate conservative” agenda. The Republican conservative base, on the other hand, wants a firm commitment to its social agenda — think opposition to gun control, affirmative action, gay marriage and abortion rights for women.

This is shoddy thinking. The two groups do not have mutually exclusive issues, the set of one poison to the other. Ronald Reagan brought these groups together famously. George Bush did a fairly good job of it in 2000.

The President’s job this convention is a walk in the park compared to Kerry getting umpteen thousand rabid anti-war delegates to cheer a “pro-war” nominee and chant, “U-S-A, U-S-A, U-S-A, U-S-A…”

This requires some dexterity, natch, but he doesn’t have to dance on the head of a pin.

Kerry’s would-be veep outlined the Dem candidate’s plan to deal with the Islamic Republic of Iran to the Washington Post for Monday’s edition:

A John F. Kerry administration would propose to Iran that the Islamic state be allowed to keep its nuclear power plants in exchange for giving up the right to retain the nuclear fuel that could be used for bomb-making, Democratic vice presidential nominee John Edwards said in an interview yesterday.

Edwards said that if Iran failed to take what he called a “great bargain,” it would essentially confirm that it is building nuclear weapons under the cover of a supposedly peaceful nuclear power initiative. He said that, if elected, Kerry would ensure that European allies were prepared to join the United States in levying heavy sanctions if Iran rejected the proposal.

Kerry would tell Iran that it could develop a nuclear fuel program if it promised nicely not to pursue nukes. The United States offering this deal alone flies in the face of Kerry’s promised internationalism. By his own calculus, he would need U.N. approval for the gullible scheme.

We do not need confirmation that Iran wants nukes. Maybe Kerry does. Who know?

He’s somehow get France to agree to levying heavy sanctions on Iran? I doubt it. It’s in their economic interest not to do so, plus they want to counterbalance the United States, not join a U.S.-led initiative.

And what sort of heavy sanctions would he lay on Iraq which would force them to abandon their nuclear program?

Is Kerry sure he’s up to the job for which he is running?

The Kerry girls, Vanessa and Alex, were loudly booed when they showed up at the MTV video awards Sunday night. Little Miss Vanessa was booed the loudest when she asked the audience to register to vote, “hopefully vote for our father.”

The Washington Dispatch, linked above, reports that the Bush twins, appearing by satellite, “got the same treatment”; another source indicates that Jenna and Barbara “were generally received well.”

Both MTV and the Kerry campaign assumed that these kids would back their candidate, but if the awards show was any indication, it is not so easy.

Still negotiating to free two French journalists taken hostage by an Iraq insurgent band, French Foreign Minister Michel Barnier has convinced the rough, tough Arab League to urge the release of the hostages.

“I urge everyone to resolve this matter as soon as possible to avoid any consequence of the matter,” [Arab League Secretary General Amr] Moussa told reporters after a meeting with visiting French Foreign Minister Michel Barnier.

“The consequences.” Okay.

I hope beyond hope that M. Barnier’s mission is successful, but the mutants are surely receiving a perverse thrill from watching the French squirm.

From Tom Curry, MSNBC National Affairs writer:

“McCain is less predictable than Bush or Kerry; his quicksilver, often mischievous personality makes him fun to loiter near.”

He’s hit a certain nail on its head.

On The Early Show (CBS) Monday morning, maverick Senator John McCain said that while attacks of JF Kerry’s record in Vietnam were “dishonest and dishorable,” it is fair game to discuss “what John Kerry did after the war.” It seems that McCain is writing the rules this time ’round, so there we have it.

He had made a similar statement on CBS’s Face the Nation on Sunday morning, as reported in the Sunday Show review in the Rightsided Newsletter.

The second ad by the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth deals specifically with what John Kerry did after the war, as does the new Chapter 6 of their book Unfit for Command.
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Senator Hillary Clinton, appearing on ABC’s This Week last Sunday, told host George Stephanopoulos that “it would be fair game to debate” Kerry’s anti-war activities.

In his first e-mailed Convention Dispatch, political analyst Charlie Cook reports:

The vast majority of political scientists and economists who forecast elections based on computer models will be presenting their papers at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association this week in Chicago, and they are projecting a Bush victory over Sen. John Kerry — in a landslide, some say. Other analysts, myself included, think Bush faces an uphill struggle.

He looks at specific forecasts.

Yale University economist Ray Fair, the dean of the election-forecasting academicians… projects that
Bush will get a whopping 57.48 percent of the major-party (combined Democratic and Republican, no independent) vote. Fair’s model is based entirely on economics — the real gross domestic product growth rate and inflation — and it carries, he says, a standard error rate of 2.4 percent in either direction.

I don’t think this is the year for an exclusively economic model.

[P]olitical scientist Helmut Norpoth of the State University of New York (Stony Brook), who gives 20-1 odds that Bush will be re-elected. His model shows a Republican two-party-vote victory of 54.7 percent to 45.3 percent. Norpoth’s model focuses on how well the nominees performed in their respective party’s primaries, on long-term partisan trends, and on how long the incumbent’s party has held the presidency.

Okay.

Oxford University’s Christopher Wlezien and Columbia University’s Robert S. Erikson… projec[t] a 52.8 percent Bush share of the two-party vote. They say that Bush has slightly better than a two-out-of-three chance of re-election.

The Wlezien/Erikson model relies upon the index of leading economic indicators, as well as on Gallup job approval ratings and trial heat data.

Cook himself, however, points out the following:

When the economic growth rate has been 4 percent or greater in the second quarter, the incumbent party has won seven of the last eight elections, Abramowitz points out, the exception being the Democrats’ loss in 1968. When the economy has grown by less than 4 percent in the second quarter, the incumbent party has lost five elections out of six, the exception being President Eisenhower’s re-election in 1956.

The revised growth rate for the second quarter of this year was 2.8-percent. So it seems clear that if this stat is to be considered meaningful, the President will need a special circumstance beyond the economy to propel him to victory.

Economic models are, I truly believe, out of place this year.

My convention reporter, Marjorie Jeffrey, tells me that some delegates from South Carolina, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, New Jersey, and Alabama went to Broadway last night to catch Fiddler on the Roof. It was introduced by Governor George Pataki, but there evidently was some trouble there was “with the Stage Actors Guild, about the actors not wanting to perform for the RNC delegations.” But they were under contract, so that was that.

On there return to the hotel, they walked through “a few leftover protesters, yelling, giving us the finger, making other rude gestures and noises.”

The protestors should be a part of the story, as they represent the opposition. It’s worse than a ’60s flashback, as it lacks even twisted idealism.

It’s in plain view.

I’ve put the new column by Barbara J. Stock, John Kerry’s “War of the Worlds”, live on the RSN web site. She talks about what the Swifties have taught us about JF Kerry.

Read the column on the RSN site: HERE.

Good morning.

I’ve put the latest from columnist Justin Darr, Bull-crapapalooza 2004, live on the RSN web site. In it, he discusses the radical protestors in New York for this week.

You can read it on the RSN site: HERE.

It seems like a set-up. In a report dated Monday, NPR.com offers us:

As the Republican Convention begins in New York, President George Bush and Sen. John Kerry are locked in a tight race and the president’s approval rating is languishing below the 50 percent mark.

That’s in an NPR poll done by Stan Greenberg and Glen Bolger, and the brief piece gives no margin of error. It is safe to assume, though, that it is within the margin of error of a split.

Assuming that they expect better than 50% after the convention for the President, they are setting him up to have a great convention and assume control of the race, according to their polls and thinking. If they wanted to do otherwise, they’ve have written a poll that would have gotten the President better approval marks before the convention so he could fall short of their projections or, if they do the poll properly, take a bath.

Marjorie Jeffrey, my convention reporter and an observer from South Carolina, has reached her hotel. The attitude of the SC delegation, she reports, is “very optimistic and excited.”

As they were settling into their hotel, they were greeted by protestors:

They looked pretty harmless but their chant was rather unfriendly to the Republicans: “RNC, go away, racist, sexist, anti-gay!”

It sounds generic enough, and we’ll hear from Marjorie again starting tomorrow: Day One.

This afternoon, C-SPAN simply turned on the cameras as the protestors walked as if in a coagulating parade down an avenue, carrying signs and whatnot.