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Published on Monday, February 23, 2004 by the San Francisco Chronicle Kerry, Edwards Care More About Polls Than Character by Harley Sorensen
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The polls made 'fraidy cats out of nearly the entire Democratic establishment. Its members decided to follow the leader (Bush), with the result that the voters decided they weren't capable of leadership. They voted the me-too Democrats out of power.
Interestingly, a handful of Democrats had the strength of character to stand up to the president and the polls. One was Paul Wellstone, the senator from Minnesota, who died in a plane crash shortly thereafter.
Another was Dennis Kucinich, the congressman from Ohio, who is running for the Democratic nomination.
Kucinich isn't doing very well. He is suffering the fate usually reserved for third-party candidates. The press has marginalized him almost into oblivion.
You'd think the press would adore him. He has definite ideas. He has a plan to end the war within three months. He has a plan to kick the insurance-company profiteers out of the health-care industry and provide first-rate health care for all Americans.
Kucinich's health-care plan may be why television doesn't like him. If the parasitic insurance-company odds makers were run out of business, they wouldn't be around to advertise on television any more. The television corporations, aggressively in the pursuit of money, would end up making less.
Horrors!
So, squeeze out Kucinich, and get Ted Koppel and Tim Russert to offer rational-sounding explanations for it. They're good at that.
Besides all that, Kucinich, at 5-foot-7, is two inches shorter than the average American male. We can't have that. Everyone knows how important it is for our president to be tall. So, the TV corporations protect us from the short man, making sure he doesn't get any more face time on TV than absolutely necessary. Give a guy like Kucinich too much exposure, and people might start to figure out he makes sense.
So, we on the liberal side are stuck with the hardcore career politicians, who in many ways are no better than George W. Bush.
It's true that no president, Democrat or Republican, could ever match Bush for wrong decision making, but it would be nice to have a liberal or middle-of-the-road president who wouldn't sell out at every tick of the polls.
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AMEN!
Peace DR
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