NYTimes: Kerry behaving like a man with the wind at his back

[DJcairo]

snip>
But in a contest that has long been as much about expectations as about actual results, the attacks on Mr. Kerry by the Dean and Gephardt campaigns were the surest sign yet that both now felt threatened by Mr. Kerry.
snip>

For his part, Mr. Kerry, who has struggled for months as Dr. Dean and retired General Wesley K. Clark ran strongly against him here and in New Hampshire, was suddenly behaving like a man with the wind at his back.

Polls of caucusgoers here are notoriously unreliable, both because of difficulties in predicting who will show up, and how they might behave in caucuses where they are encouraged to change their minds.

But all week, public and private surveys have shown Mr. Kerry moving up, and he has drawn overflow crowds and sympathetic audiences of undecided voters as he spends 20 hours a day crisscrossing the state from the Mississippi to the Missouri.

http://nytimes.com/2004/01/17/politics/campaigns/17DEMS.html?pagewanted=1

[stickdog]

1. Note that the NW Times "voted for" the IWR, too!

Please contrast this article with the Times' constant hammering of Dean.

[DJcairo]

2. Dean can't really complain

Last summer, the media pumped up his campaign to such an extent that virtually all the other candidates were treated as also rans.

[IndianaGreen]

5. The New York Times whitewashes Bush’s lies about Iraq

I am not surprised that the NY Times is gushing about Kerry. Here is another hard hitting piece by WSWS about the NY Times:

The New York Times whitewashes Bush’s lies about Iraq
By Patrick Martin
15 January 2004

An editorial published January 11 in the New York Times, the leading US daily newspaper, demonstrates the intellectual and moral bankruptcy of what passes for liberalism in contemporary America. It is a cover-up of the systematic lying employed by the Bush administration, the congressional Republicans and Democrats, and the American media to justify the US invasion and occupation of Iraq.

The Times whitewash is particularly reprehensible because it seeks to masquerade as a critique of the Bush administration’s preparation and launching of the war. There are more than a few harsh adjectives to describe the White House’s actions: “reckless rush to invade Iraq,” “obsession with the Iraqi dictator,” “falsity of intelligence estimates,” “failure to find anything significant.”

The central proposition advanced by the Times is that the Bush administration was a victim of misinformation and misjudgments, which led the US government to produce what the editorial’s headline describes as “The Faulty Weapons Estimates.” This is a grotesque lie: Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld & Co. were not merely mistaken on the question of weapons of mass destruction. They deliberately and consciously fabricated claims of an imminent Iraqi threat to the United States to terrorize the American people and override the widespread popular opposition to an unprovoked invasion of a sovereign nation.

It is hardly necessary to rehash in detail the massive evidence of US lies on Iraq. The major allegations of weapons of mass destruction made by Bush administration spokesmen during the seven-month campaign for war, from September 2002 to March 2003, have been completely disproved, in many cases even before the war began. The Bush White House was compelled to admit that one of the central charges made in Bush’s State of Union Speech in January 2003, that Iraq was seeking to purchase uranium for nuclear weapons in Africa, was false and was known to be false by US officials when Bush’s speechwriters put the words in his mouth.

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2004/jan2004/wmd-j15.shtml

[delhurgo]

3. His momentum may continue through the weekend,...

....and if it does I'll have to re-evaluate. But Kerry does not seem very confident to me. Ive noticed this in recent interviews and speeches. At least thats the way he appears to me, sort of low-key. And I think the reason for this is he doesnt want expectations to get out of hand, but more importantly, he does not have the organization in Iowa that Dean and Gephardt has - this is what has him worried. Even with these most recent polls showing him in the lead, at this point I'd predict him to finish third for that reason. I think that Edwards faces the same problem and will finish a distant fourth. Who will finish 1 and 2 is what is almost impossible to call. I wonder though how many Nader-type voters Dean is counting on to win. These are the kind of people who go to the speeches and scream, but aren't dependable to vote. Thats why Nader ended up with a lower percentage of the vote in 2000 than was predicted, imo.

I guess at this point my prediction is 1.Gephardt 2.Dean 3.Kerry 4.Edwards.

[nightperson]

4. Speaking of wind, and at the risk of seeming really "out there",

I'll post the link to this old song http://www.bobdylan.com/songs/blowin.html that's been running through my head a lot these days. Timely, intense and evocative, IMHO. I think it's relevant to the Kerry campaign, but mostly just relevant. I hope everybody is doing well. I'll vote for Zilla the Gorilla before Bush.