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Iowa 2004 presidential primary precinct caucus and caucuses news">
Iowa 2004 presidential primary precinct caucus and caucuses news, reports
and information on 2004 Democrat and Republican candidates, campaigns
and issues Iowa
Presidential Watch's
IOWA DAILY REPORT Holding
the Democrats accountable today, tomorrow...forever.
The Iowa Daily Report,
Thursday, October 30, 2003
... QUOTABLE: "This does not mean I am
going to become a Republican,"
Sen. Zell Miller
said in a written statement. "It simply
means that in the year 2004, this Democrat will
vote for George Bush." "They don't have any
evidence. The guy was their audio-recording the
event. If this is true, why don't they have an
audio-recording of it?"
said Erik Smith,
a spokesman for Representative Richard A. Gephardt
regarding Dean campaign worker Hunter Allen,
shoving and name calling incident. "We have expressed our
deepest regrets to Senator Lieberman, a friend of
Senator Kerry's for many years, and made it clear
that, of course, Senator Kerry deplores and will
not tolerate the injection of religion into this
race in any manner whatsoever,"
said Robert
Gibbs regarding a Kerry supporter, an Arizona
legislator, for using Jewish hatred in campaigning
for Kerry. "It's Dean or no one,"
said Service
Employees International Union spokeswoman Sara
Howard regarding the largest union member of the
AFL-CIO. "This president really is
fiddling while the globe is warming,"
said Sen. Joe
Lieberman regarding global warming. "I'll say that the world
is more peaceful and more free under my
leadership, and America is more secure,"
President Bush
said regarding what he will say when he begins
campaigning.
Clinton
fund-raiser John Catsimatidis, the chief executive
officer of the Gristede's supermarket chain who is
supporting John Kerry, said, "I know for a
fact a lot of her supporters are urging her to do
it." -- Comments
made in the NY Daily News regarding Hillary
Clinton’s slamming Bush yesterday fueling
speculation about a White House run. "There's lots of reasons
to believe that what we saw in this quarter is
attributable to the president's jobs and growth
package," said
Greg Mankiw, chairman of the White House Council
of Economic Advisers regarding the 7.2 percent
economic growth in the last quarter.
NY Mayor
Bloomberg told reporters Dean "is just
ill-informed."
The comment came after Dean flip-flopped on how NY
should conduct its elections according to the NY
Daily newspaper. "Liberation is at hand.
Liberation — the powerful balm that justifies
painful sacrifice, erases lingering doubt and
reinforces bold actions ... As for the political
leaders themselves, President Bush and Tony Blair
should be proud of their resolve in the face of so
much doubt,"
Wesley Clark wrote in the London Times on April
10. "The best way to help the
addict ... is to change their heart,"
Bush said in a
reference to how he stopped drinking at age 40.
"See, if you change their heart, then they change
their behavior. "I know!" “Iowa is the Super Bowl
of field organizing, a dying art in American
politics in which candidates and their supporters
campaign from town to town and door to door,
building a base of support through repeated
personal contacts with people who are likely to
participate in the caucuses.”
Taken from the
Boston Globe today’s story on Gephardt. ''My choice basically was
that I decided in August (2001) that I wasn't
going to run again (for governor),''
he [Howard
Dean]said. ''It then quickly came to me
that I had a choice of joining boards and swearing
at The New York Times every morning and
saying how outrageous it was. Basically, I was in
a position where I thought I could run for
president, so I decided that I was going to,''
from USA Today’s
Walter Shapiro’s clip of his forthcoming book
One-Car Caravan: On the Road with the 2004
Democrats Before America Tunes In. ''We signed the letter
and we intend to stand by it,''
said Lieberman
campaign spokesman Adam Kovacevich regarding not
participating in the Florida’s non-binding $50,000
candidate shakedown straw poll. “Just because they’ve got
military/Department of Defense on it, it’s stamped
secret, that doesn’t mean it’s sacrosanct to me. I
know a lot of those programs, and there’s probably
some of them that can be looked at real hard,
too,” said
Wesley Clark about cutting the military to provide
$700 billion for child healthcare. "I know something about
what it takes to win a war -- it takes a clear
plan for success. This administration has no plan.
We should not give one more dime until they put
forward that plan,"
replied Wesley
Clark to Lieberman’s TV ads referring to other
Democrat presidential candidates being
inconsistent on the Iraq War. "I suspect,"
Justice O'Connor
said, "that over time we will rely
increasingly — or take notice, at least —
increasingly on international and foreign courts
in examining domestic issues."
Finally, in Memory
of anniversary of the death of Paul Wellstone: "He worked out at the
Capitol Police gym, and he still holds the record
there for doing the most chin-ups."
Mr. Wellstone also holds the gym's pushup record —
89 in one minute according to Sen. Harry Reid,
Nevada Democrat.
… Among the
offerings in today’s update:
* CANDIDATES &
CAUCUSES: Dean staffers say an openly gay
campaign worker was pushed by Gephardt's Iowa
campaign manager and called a "faggot" by someone
else on Gephardt's national staff. The
confrontations allegedly occurred Tuesday
afternoon, following Gephardt's speech on health
care at an east-side senior center, according to a
Des Moines Register article. Iowa Presidential
Watch reported on this story yesterday as it was
beginning to break on Drudge. The current Register
story goes in depth over the nuances of what is
known and what is not known. So far, no one has
the name of the staff person who allegedly did the
shoving and name-calling. The Register reports the
following response from the Gephardt campaign:
Smith said Murphy, Gephardt's national campaign
manager, conducted an internal investigation,
interviewing campaign workers, and concluded the
name-calling allegation was untrue. "However, it's
important to say that if anyone on this campaign
used any kind of slur like that, they would be
fired," Smith said. He also declined to identify
the staff member accused of confronting Allen.
"These are McCarthyite tactics," he said. "I'm not
going to offer up somebody's name for a totally
unsubstantiated rumor," he said, adding that the
Dean campaign" should be ashamed of itself." The
Boston Globe gets a report from Iowa on the
Gephardt campaign. The story chronicles Gephardt’s
methodical approach concerning his need to win
Iowa. From the Globe: Like the candidate,
Gephardt's campaign lacks bells and whistles.
There is none of the innovation or razzle-dazzle
of Dean's campaign. That's unless you count "The
Great Gephardt Iowa Pie Challenge" link on his
campaign website. There, visitors are invited to
"tell Dick where you think he should go for his
next slice of pie." [NOTE: The story is very good
and you should check it out.] Dean is poised to receive the
endorsement of the largest, 1.6 million-members,
union in the AFL-CIO. The Service Employees
International Union board members are set to ask
the question of whether they endorse Howard Dean
for President. The
Associated Press reports that no one else is
under consideration. The question is whether they
endorse Dean or take a pass for now. In what appears to be an unusual
lack of perspective by major media outlets the NY
Times is running a story that questions the
electability of both Howard Dean and Wesley Clark.
Clarks profile dominates the story because about
the only thing Clark has going for him is the
claim he can beat Bush. However the story points
out how electability has doggedly followed Dean.
It takes a quote from Iowa Public Televisions’
Iowa Press’ interview with Dean: "It's possible
that I am the only Democrat who can get elected,"
he said. "And let me tell you why: Every other
Democrat in this race believes that the way to
beat George Bush is to be like George Bush. I
believe the way to beat George Bush is to bring a
lot of new people into this process." The NY
Daily News is running a story about Dean’s
ventures into the big apple and it appears he made
it his way: Democratic presidential hopeful Howard
Dean's foray into New York City politics backfired
yesterday when he appeared to take conflicting
positions on whether party primaries for local
offices should be dumped. If Democrat presidential
campaigns aren’t gay bashing they are inflaming
Jewish hatred according to the
Associated Press. However, Sen. John Kerry
upon hearing about the incident reported in The
Arizona Republic that state Democratic Rep. Ben
Miranda was trying to persuade backers of
Lieberman to switch allegiance because the
Connecticut senator, who is Jewish. Lieberman
campaign manager Craig Smith issued a statement
Wednesday morning calling on Kerry to "take swift
action to rebuke these statements and disassociate
himself from these individuals who have used these
tactics on his behalf." That's just what Kerry
did. Kerry spokesman Robert Gibbs issued a
statement that said the campaign investigated the
matter and found that no campaign staffers were
responsible, but the campaign "severed its
association" with Miranda. Kerry at a book-signing event in
Iowa City called Howard Dean, “Mr. Avoidance. The
reference to Mr. Avoidance came up in a Daily
Iowan interview regarding Dean’s refusal to
participate in a debate in Iowa City with Kerry
and Gephardt. According to the
Daily Iowan: Kerry also made some noise by
calling former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean "Mr.
Avoidance" in response to his decision not to
participate in an Iowa City Press-Citizen debate.
The three-way meeting would include Dean, Kerry,
and Rep. Dick Gephardt, D-Mo. - the three
Democratic front-runners in Iowa, according to an
Oct. 22 Zogby International poll. "He ought to
defend the issues," Kerry said. "It's inexcusable
that he's ducking." Dean’s response: "If
anyone is 'Mr. Avoidance,' it's Sen. Kerry for
avoiding opportunities to make his position on the
war in Iraq clear," said Sarah Leonard, Dean's
Iowa communications director. She added that she
did not recall Dean's campaign ever receiving any
formal invitation to the specific debate to which
it could have responded. Democratic presidential
candidate John F. Kerry received endorsements
yesterday from two New York Democrats,
Representatives Tim Bishop and Carolyn McCarthy.
He now has the support of 19 House members and two
senators. The Manchester
Union Leader reports that retired general said
if he were elected President, some military
projects might have to wait for funding behind
programs that help children, such as the health
care program he announced this week, which would
mandate all children have health insurance. That
proposal’s $700 billion cost over 10 years would
be paid, in part, by reducing government waste and
its “excess, redundant and unnecessary programs,”
including defense spending, he said. Where oh where have the logic
and facts gone? This is what many observers are
wondering about Wesley Clark’s position regarding
foreign policy and his positions vis-a-vis the
Bush administration. Excerpts from
Fox News report today: "Liberation is at hand.
Liberation — the powerful balm that justifies
painful sacrifice, erases lingering doubt and
reinforces bold actions ... As for the political
leaders themselves, President Bush and Tony Blair
should be proud of their resolve in the face of so
much doubt," he wrote. With comments like that,
Clark's credibility as an opponent of war is under
increasing attack. The statement implied that
somehow Bush should have known that the United
States was going to get attacked, said Mort
Kondracke, executive editor of Roll Call and a
frequent contributor to Fox News. Kondracke called
that contention nonsense. "There had been reports
that the president was told that Al Qaeda intended
to hijack American airplanes. When? Where? How? I
mean what could you do? It was not actionable
intelligence," Kondracke said. "We broke the
dishes, we're going to have to pay for them,"
Clark told supporters in New Hampshire this week.
"Mr. Clark has a right to oppose the $87 billion
as long as he comes up with something better, and
so far, I don't think he has," said Michael
O'Hanlon of the Brookings Institution. Wesley Clark rolled out his
health care plan yesterday, but he stomped it onto
the back page -- or in most cases off the news
page -- with his vitriolic attack on Bush
yesterday. On his website, you need to go to the
plan itself to get anything on the proposal. The
speech and the press release don’t do it. Clark’s
proposal would guaranteed coverage to all
Americans under the age of 22, subsidize insurance
for groups with special disadvantages and allow
people without employee-provided health care to
use the same system that covers members of
Congress. Drawing heavily on references to the
good health care he received as a member of the
Army, Clark claimed that his plan would insure
31.8 million of the 43 million now uninsured. Sen. John Edwards is finding it
hard going in the commitment category. He seems to
woo the voters but doesn’t get the yes according
to LA Times article: The question that now dogs
the Edwards campaign is whether he can recapture
the buzz that surrounded his candidacy when he
ended the first quarter of this year as the top
fund-raiser among the Democratic candidates. … as
Edwards comes to Los Angeles Wednesday for a tour
of African American churches and a fund-raiser
hosted by actor Ashton Kutcher at the home of
actor Dennis Hopper — he is struggling to gain
some momentum before a series of primaries in
early February that include a virtual must-win
contest for him in South Carolina. The LATimes
also points out: A key reason for skepticism about
Edwards' chances is that his campaign has fallen
off its early fund-raising pace. He collected only
$2.6 million in the third quarter of the year,
compared to the more than $7 million he raised in
the first quarter.
USA Today is running excerpts from Walter
Shapiro’s forthcoming book, One-Car Caravan: On
the Road with the 2004 Democrats Before America
Tunes In, in Today’s edition. There is the
likelihood that the book could change some
opinions about who to support. Excerpts:
“Even though Kerry was the only man in the room
who removed his suit jacket in an effort to appear
informal and relaxed, he came across as tense and
a bit defensive. Kerry's presentation provided the
first intimations of a flaw in his candidacy -- he
tried so hard to be reassuring and was so
conscious of the ''Massachusetts liberal'' label
that he failed to make clear his rationale for
running.” “For
Attie, who was Al Gore's chief speechwriter during
the 2000 campaign, was about to re-enter the
real-life world of presidential politics. The
60-page ''script'' under the TV writer's arm was
really a compilation of a Democrat's policy
positions and stump speeches, printed out on the
only paper used in the fax machines of The West
Wing. And the candidate who joined Attie for a
drink at the Four Seasons was far more Heartland
than Hollywood. [Regarding Atti’s meeting with
Dick Gephardt and helping with Gephardt’s
announcement.]” “…in
the midst of taping commercials for her husband
John Edwards' 1998 Senate race, Elizabeth
Edwards was asked by media consultant Tad Devine,
''Why did you marry him?'' Instead of the usual
prattle about a good heart or love at first sight,
she responded with an answer that captured the
essence of Edwards' political appeal: ''I married
him because he was so optimistic.'' Florida’s non-binding straw poll
-- where they shake down every candidate for
$50,000 to participate -- could be resolved at
next month's meeting of the state party's central
committee, which will vote on whether to conduct
the poll. However, according to the
Congressional Quarterly Scott Maddox, Florida
Democrat Party chairman, in a telephone conference
call with Democratic state committee members Oct.
22, found no opposition to holding a straw ballot.
"I have yet to find anyone in the state of Florida
who is against the straw poll," Maddox told the
state committee, which is set to approve the
ballot plan Nov. 16. If Florida holds the straw
poll, several candidates and most importantly
Democrat National Committee Chairman Terry
McAuliffe will be in an uncomfortable spot.
Probably the surest winner will be Howard Dean who
is already campaigning for the straw ballot. His
team sent e-mails to Florida voters instructing
them how to sign up as delegates to the Orlando
convention. However, his win would come with a
loss if it is understood that Dean was the first
to break his pledge not to participate in the
straw poll. Big losers will be the bottom wrung
candidates of Sharpton, Moseley Braun and
Kucinich. These candidates will find their dry
fund-raising wells go even dryer. Lieberman will
lose no matter what. Florida is called Lieberman’s
second home and to finish second might be called a
loss. Lieberman is also standing on principle
saying he will honor the pledge made to the DNC
and not attend. He can be very persistent when it
comes to a point of principle. Edwards and Kerry
are the two that could make some points and at
least come away with 2nd and 3rd
spots if Lieberman stays out. They are the two who
could benefit the most from this Florida hold-up
of candidates. Iowa Governor takes on NY:
Iowa’s Governor Tom Vilsack may not be the
terminator, but he fired off a missive to the NY
Times Editorial Page about their comment of
“Quaint Iowa.” Excerpt: "Is it 'quaint' when
Iowans tell campaigning politicians that we are
worried about the economy, fearful for our sons
and daughters serving in Iraq and Afghanistan,
frustrated by the rising cost of health care, and
concerned about the jobless and the homeless?"
Vilsack, a Democrat, wrote. "Contrast this
'quaint' process in Iowa and New Hampshire with
the process that follows: staged airport rallies
in large media markets, meaningless sound bites
and negative attacks," he wrote. It’s not the
pork chops: Des Moines Register Columnist
David Yepsen continues his defense of Iowa against
the NY Times article and others who object to
Iowa’s “First in the Nation” caucuses: Excerpts:
And some presidential Wannabee is always making
political investments in Iowa and New Hampshire
with an eye to reaping dividends in a future
presidential campaign. These investors have no
desire to change the calendar and wipe out their
equity. For example, New York Gov. George Pataki
is coming out next month to keynote the Iowa GOP's
big fall fund-raiser. The following week, New York
Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton shows up to help
the Democrats at their big fall event, the
Jefferson-Jackson Dinner.” They sure aren't coming
here for the fall foliage. Or the pork chops.
Check it out. (Link)
* ON THE BUSH
BEAT: Sen. Zell Miller (GA) is a
lifelong Democrat who gave the keynote speech at
the Democratic convention in 1992. He is the
former governor of Georgia and one of the most
popular Democrats in the state. In Miller’s soon
to be published book, A National Party No More:
The Conscience of a Conservative Democrat,
compares the current Democrat presidential
candidates to "streetwalkers in skimpy halters and
hot pants plying their age-old trade for the fat
wallets on K Street." On Thursday, Bush attends two
fund-raisers for his re-election, in Columbus,
Ohio, and in San Antonio. Saturday will find the
president making two stops in Mississippi and two
in Kentucky for the Republican gubernatorial
candidates facing voters there next Tuesday. On
Monday, on the way back to Washington from his
ranch, Bush swings through Birmingham, Alabama, to
add more cash to his campaign account.
* THE CLINTON
COMEDIES: [Go to Washington Times
Inside Politics] United Press International
reports that Mrs. Clinton said the Bush
administration's secrecy about September 11 and
prewar intelligence on Iraq was "more about
political embarrassment than national security."
Speculation and support for Hillary to run for
president continues. It will not help with the
latest poll numbers putting her against the
current Democrat field: H. Clinton 43%; Clark 10;
Lieberman 8; Gephardt 8; Kerry 7; Dean 7; Edwards
5; Sharpton 1; Braun 1; Kucinich 1; Undec. 10.
Dean where did your numbers go? As a result, "the
pillars of [our] democracy are shaking," said the
former first lady, who invoked executive secrecy
to protect discussions by her health care task
force "According to[Bill] Clinton's
account, he tried to convince Bush to abandon his
other national-security priorities to focus on al
Qaeda during an 'exit interview' with the newly
elected president. 'In his campaign, Bush had said
he thought the biggest security issue was Iraq and
national missile defense,' Clinton remarked. 'I
told him that in my opinion, the biggest security
problem was Osama bin Laden.' Clinton maintained
that his inability to budge Bush was 'one of the
two or three of the biggest disappointments that I
had.' It is news to the White House. This is the
second such story to run. The first was that
Clinton knew all about Tony Blairs heart trouble.
Ten Downing street is scratching their heads on
that one.
* NATIONAL The
Miami Herald is reporting that Graham will
make an announcement on decision to run for the
Senate on Monday: Senior aides to Sen. Bob Graham
are laying plans for a Florida speech likely to
take place Monday in Tallahassee announcing
whether he will seek a fourth term to the Senate.
Graham said Wednesday that he remains undecided
about his future, but an e-mail sent to about 70
staffers under the subject heading ''Update on
Reelection Announcement'' was the strongest
suggestion yet that a well-orchestrated campaign
launch was in the works.
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