How Liberal is John Kerry?

A new RNC ad claims Kerry is “the most liberal man in the Senate.” Actually, his lifetime rating is 11th or lower, depending.

A Republican National Committee ad released Oct. 16 claims that Kerry is “the most liberal man in the Senate.” It’s true that vote rankings by the politically neutral magazine The National Journal rated Kerry “most liberal” in 2003 and in three earlier years during his first Senate term: 1986, 1988, and 1990. But over his entire career the Journal ranks Kerry the 11th most liberal Senator. And by other rankings he’s only a bit left of his party’s center.

The Candidates Respond – New Voters Project Presidential Youth Debate

Your Questions and the Candidate Responses

1. ISSUES OF MORALITY
2. SOCIAL SECURITY
3. FOREIGN POLICY
4. DRAFT
5. ELECTION/VOTING REFORM
6. DRUG POLICY
7. ENVIRONMENT
8. EDUCATION (SEX ED)
9. CIVIL RIGHTS
10. HEALTH INSURANCE
11. PERSONAL
12. TOLERANCE FOR THOSE WHO ARE DIFFERENT

Rate the responses as you read them and see how they measure up with other young people

– Bush Adds Teeth to His Attacks on Kerry

Mr. Kerry did propose the reductions Mr. Bush cited. But in the mid-1990’s, members of both parties were seeking cuts in the intelligence budget. Porter J. Goss, then a Republican member of Congress from Florida and recently appointed director of central intelligence by Mr. Bush, co-sponsored legislation in 1995 that would have reduced intelligence spending by more than the cuts sought by Mr. Kerry.

Similarly, in citing Mr. Kerry’s support for cuts in weapons programs, Mr. Bush ignored the bipartisan effort in the 1990’s to scale back or end production of many planes, ships, missiles and other military hardware. The Kerry campaign on Monday detailed how Vice President Dick Cheney has spearheaded some of those moves. …

“Mr. President, you can choose to ignore the facts, but in the end you can’t hide the truth from the American people,” Mr. Kerry said. “The bottom line, Mr. President: your mismanagement of the war has made Iraq and America less safe and less secure than they could have and should have been today.”

The New York Times – Bush Adds Teeth to His Attacks on Kerry By DAVID E. SANGER and JODI WILGOREN

Using phrases that appeared to reflect the language of one of his leading advisers, Karen Hughes, Mr. Bush accused Mr. Kerry of taking “the easy path of protest and defeatism,” a phrase that evoked Mr. Kerry’s statements about Vietnam 34 years ago. His use of terms like “a policy of weakness,” “giving up the fight” and “a strategy of retreat” appeared intended to paint Mr. Kerry as an appeaser at best and a coward at worst.

Mr. Kerry’s campaign, clearly outraged, described the statements as brazen distortions, driven by desperation as the casualties in Iraq mounted. Kerry aides promised an aggressive response in a new television advertisement to be broadcast on Tuesday and a speech in Iowa on Wednesday.

Mike McCurry, Mr. Kerry’s chief spokesman, called Mr. Bush’s remarks a “thoroughly dishonest speech” that deliberately twisted Mr. Kerry’s words.

For his part, Mr. Kerry seized on a new report in The Washington Post that Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez complained to the Pentagon last winter, when he was the top America commander on the ground in Iraq, that he lacked supplies vital to successful combat operations.

“Despite the president’s arrogant boasting that he’s done everything right in Iraq and that he’s made no mistakes, the truth is beginning to come out and it’s beginning to catch up with him,” Mr. Kerry told a crowd….

Anyone who has seen Kerry campaign in the primary or the general election has seen he is no quiter, no softie. We see with our own eyes Bush’s lies. mjh

The New York Times Magazine – Without a Doubt By RON SUSKIND

Bruce Bartlett, a domestic policy adviser to Ronald Reagan and a treasury official for the first President Bush, told me recently that ”if Bush wins, there will be a civil war in the Republican Party starting on Nov. 3.” The nature of that conflict, as Bartlett sees it? Essentially, the same as the one raging across much of the world: a battle between modernists and fundamentalists, pragmatists and true believers, reason and religion.

”Just in the past few months,” Bartlett said, ”I think a light has gone off for people who’ve spent time up close to Bush: that this instinct he’s always talking about is this sort of weird, Messianic idea of what he thinks God has told him to do.” Bartlett, a 53-year-old columnist and self-described libertarian Republican who has lately been a champion for traditional Republicans concerned about Bush’s governance, went on to say: ”This is why George W. Bush is so clear-eyed about Al Qaeda and the Islamic fundamentalist enemy. He believes you have to kill them all. They can’t be persuaded, that they’re extremists, driven by a dark vision. He understands them, because he’s just like them. . . .

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”This is why he dispenses with people who confront him with inconvenient facts,” Bartlett went on to say. ”He truly believes he’s on a mission from God. Absolute faith like that overwhelms a need for analysis. The whole thing about faith is to believe things for which there is no empirical evidence.” Bartlett paused, then said, ”But you can’t run the world on faith.” …

The president would say that he relied on his ”gut” or his ”instinct” to guide the ship of state, and then he ”prayed over it.” The old pro Bartlett, a deliberative, fact-based wonk, is finally hearing a tune that has been hummed quietly by evangelicals (so as not to trouble the secular) for years as they gazed upon President George W. Bush. This evangelical group — the core of the energetic ”base” that may well usher Bush to victory — believes that their leader is a messenger from God. And in the first presidential debate, many Americans heard the discursive John Kerry succinctly raise, for the first time, the issue of Bush’s certainty — the issue being, as Kerry put it, that ”you can be certain and be wrong.” …

The president has demanded unquestioning faith from his followers, his staff, his senior aides and his kindred in the Republican Party. Once he makes a decision — often swiftly, based on a creed or moral position — he expects complete faith in its rightness.

The disdainful smirks and grimaces that many viewers were surprised to see in the first presidential debate are familiar expressions to those in the administration or in Congress who have simply asked the president to explain his positions. Since 9/11, those requests have grown scarce; Bush’s intolerance of doubters has, if anything, increased, and few dare to question him now.

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