Publish to Newswire
Add an EventFrom the Open-Publishing Calendar
From the Open-Publishing Newswire
Indybay Feature
Bush Now 6 pts ahead thanks to a little help from Bin Laden
George W Bush moved yesterday to seize the political advantage after Osama bin Laden's extraordinary intervention in the US presidential election on Friday night....A Newsweek tracker poll published yesterday suggested the momentum may be moving in the incumbent's way. The poll predicted Bush to win by 50 per cent to Kerry's 44, compared with a 48-46 gap last week.
As the candidates spent their last Saturday before Tuesday's election attacking one another over terrorism, political analysts were quick to suggest that bin Laden's intervention would favour Bush, who has consistently led John Kerry on security.
As the candidates spent their last Saturday before Tuesday's election attacking one another over terrorism, political analysts were quick to suggest that bin Laden's intervention would favour Bush, who has consistently led John Kerry on security.
...
Analysts were divided over the impact. Peverill Squire, a political scientist at the University of Iowa, told the Los Angeles Times: 'We have become so divided in terms of partisanship that each side will read what they want into the statement. What Republicans are thinking is: "This puts the focus back on terrorism." And the people supporting Kerry say this shows bin Laden is alive and well three years after we said we were going to get him.'
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uselections2004/story/0,13918,1340331,00.html
A Reuters/Zogby poll also released yesterday showed Mr Kerry with a wafer-thin 47-46 lead but that was conducted before the bin Laden tape was aired. Other recent polls have given the president a small lead nationally but the final result will be determined by the outcome in about 10 swing states.
Although senior aides insisted that the candidates would not allow the bin Laden tape to overshadow campaigning, Mr Bush and Mr Kerry took fresh swipes at each other over security as they criss-crossed battleground states in last-ditch get-out-the-vote campaigns.
Buoyed by a rapturous rally appearance in Columbus, Ohio, on Friday night alongside Arnold Schwarzenegger, the Terminator star who is now California's governor, Mr Bush contrasted his whatever-it-takes leadership with Mr Kerry's "cut-and-run" approach during a stop in Wisconsin. Mr Kerry, also campaigning in Wisconsin and Ohio, criticised the administration's failure to capture bin Laden in the Tora Bora mountains.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2004/10/31/wus31.xml&sSheet=/news/2004/10/31/ixnewstop.html
``It's very helpful to the president,'' said Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.). McCain said the tape ``focuses America's attention on the war on terrorism. I'm not sure if it was intentional or not, but I think it does have an effect.''
http://news.bostonherald.com/election/view.bg?articleid=51743
GEORGE W Bush appeared last night to have taken a slim lead over his Democratic challenger for the presidency following Osama bin Laden’s spectacular videotaped intervention in the race for the White House.
The US President was given a six point lead over John Kerry in one poll, as both candidates scrambled to deliver the most plausible strategy for dealing with bin Laden.
But the presidential race was still desperately close, with candidates bracing themselves for no overall victory to be declared once the votes are counted on Wednesday, giving way to weeks of lawsuits, recounts and acrimony.
Opinion polls conducted after bin Laden’s videotaped message was broadcast on Friday evening suggested that American voters are already sufficiently nervous about the war on terror to give Bush a lead in the nationwide vote.
A poll by Newsweek magazine gave Bush a six-point lead across the country. Fox News gave the president a two-point lead and a Washington Post poll gave Bush a three-point lead. A Reuters/Zogby poll put Kerry ahead by a "statistically insignificant" one point.
But local polls, watched more closely by campaign managers, show this would still be reversed by the US electoral college system, with Kerry leading by 272 votes to 266. This is small enough to be overturned by Hawaii, which has just turned a swing state.
http://scotlandonsunday.scotsman.com/index.cfm?id=1259622004
THE video tape arrived with the rest of the day’s mail. It had been dropped off, in a plain envelope, at the gate of Al-Jazeera’s offices in Islamabad, but it was only when the guard handed it to Ahmad Muaffaq Zaidan, the Arabic TV station’s bureau chief in the Pakistani capital, that its importance became clear. Within hours the package had been transferred to the channel’s HQ in Qatar, from where it was broadcast to the world.
"I opened it and it was a big scoop," Zaidan said yesterday. That was something of an understatement. The arrival of a video of Osama bin Laden, the first concrete sign of the al-Qaeda leader’s existence for six months, will now dominate the last few days of the world’s most important election, that for the US presidency.
http://scotlandonsunday.scotsman.com/opinion.cfm?id=1259022004
Analysts were divided over the impact. Peverill Squire, a political scientist at the University of Iowa, told the Los Angeles Times: 'We have become so divided in terms of partisanship that each side will read what they want into the statement. What Republicans are thinking is: "This puts the focus back on terrorism." And the people supporting Kerry say this shows bin Laden is alive and well three years after we said we were going to get him.'
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uselections2004/story/0,13918,1340331,00.html
A Reuters/Zogby poll also released yesterday showed Mr Kerry with a wafer-thin 47-46 lead but that was conducted before the bin Laden tape was aired. Other recent polls have given the president a small lead nationally but the final result will be determined by the outcome in about 10 swing states.
Although senior aides insisted that the candidates would not allow the bin Laden tape to overshadow campaigning, Mr Bush and Mr Kerry took fresh swipes at each other over security as they criss-crossed battleground states in last-ditch get-out-the-vote campaigns.
Buoyed by a rapturous rally appearance in Columbus, Ohio, on Friday night alongside Arnold Schwarzenegger, the Terminator star who is now California's governor, Mr Bush contrasted his whatever-it-takes leadership with Mr Kerry's "cut-and-run" approach during a stop in Wisconsin. Mr Kerry, also campaigning in Wisconsin and Ohio, criticised the administration's failure to capture bin Laden in the Tora Bora mountains.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2004/10/31/wus31.xml&sSheet=/news/2004/10/31/ixnewstop.html
``It's very helpful to the president,'' said Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.). McCain said the tape ``focuses America's attention on the war on terrorism. I'm not sure if it was intentional or not, but I think it does have an effect.''
http://news.bostonherald.com/election/view.bg?articleid=51743
GEORGE W Bush appeared last night to have taken a slim lead over his Democratic challenger for the presidency following Osama bin Laden’s spectacular videotaped intervention in the race for the White House.
The US President was given a six point lead over John Kerry in one poll, as both candidates scrambled to deliver the most plausible strategy for dealing with bin Laden.
But the presidential race was still desperately close, with candidates bracing themselves for no overall victory to be declared once the votes are counted on Wednesday, giving way to weeks of lawsuits, recounts and acrimony.
Opinion polls conducted after bin Laden’s videotaped message was broadcast on Friday evening suggested that American voters are already sufficiently nervous about the war on terror to give Bush a lead in the nationwide vote.
A poll by Newsweek magazine gave Bush a six-point lead across the country. Fox News gave the president a two-point lead and a Washington Post poll gave Bush a three-point lead. A Reuters/Zogby poll put Kerry ahead by a "statistically insignificant" one point.
But local polls, watched more closely by campaign managers, show this would still be reversed by the US electoral college system, with Kerry leading by 272 votes to 266. This is small enough to be overturned by Hawaii, which has just turned a swing state.
http://scotlandonsunday.scotsman.com/index.cfm?id=1259622004
THE video tape arrived with the rest of the day’s mail. It had been dropped off, in a plain envelope, at the gate of Al-Jazeera’s offices in Islamabad, but it was only when the guard handed it to Ahmad Muaffaq Zaidan, the Arabic TV station’s bureau chief in the Pakistani capital, that its importance became clear. Within hours the package had been transferred to the channel’s HQ in Qatar, from where it was broadcast to the world.
"I opened it and it was a big scoop," Zaidan said yesterday. That was something of an understatement. The arrival of a video of Osama bin Laden, the first concrete sign of the al-Qaeda leader’s existence for six months, will now dominate the last few days of the world’s most important election, that for the US presidency.
http://scotlandonsunday.scotsman.com/opinion.cfm?id=1259022004
We are 100% volunteer and depend on your participation to sustain our efforts!
Donate
$330.00 donated
in the past month
Get Involved
If you'd like to help with maintaining or developing the website, contact us.
Publish
Publish your stories and upcoming events on Indybay.
Topics
More
Search Indybay's Archives
Advanced Search
►
▼
IMC Network
Right on time, too -- four days before the election. (The Madrid bombing was three days before.)
Osama bin Laden, reading a statement to the American people in a new videotape aired Friday, directly admitted for the first time that he ordered the Sept. 11 attacks and said "the best way to avoid another Manhattan" was to stop threatening Muslims' security...
He accused President Bush of "misleading" the American people since the 2001 suicide airline hijackings that hit the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
"Your security is not in the hands of (Democratic candidate John) Kerry or Bush or al-Qaida. Your security is in your own hands," bin Laden said.
If anyone had any doubts about which candidate al-Qaeda prefers in this election, I think you can put them to rest now. This tape -- coming hard on the heels of "Azzam the American" -- is obviously designed to have U.S. voters as obsessively worried about the terrorist threat as possible when they go into the voting booth next Tuesday. Osama, like Bush, understands the electoral value of zapping the deeper reptilian centers of the brain. Call it hypothalamus politics. Or, as one member of the media idiot chorus cheerfully told CNN a few days ago: "Fear works."
In a way, this move is even smarter than an actual terrorist attack on American soil -- which al-Qaeda might not have been able to pull off anyway. A real attack would have been an unpredictable gamble. It might have given Bush a huge boost, but it's at least conceivable it would have had the opposite effect, by underscoring the hollowness of the endlessly repeated Republican claim that our cowboy-in-chief has made us all safer.
Osama's video bomb, on the other hand, is a brilliant example of "virtual" terrorism. It's perfectly designed to keep the media tape loop spinning from now until next Tuesday, with minimal risk of a backlash. It not only wipes the missing explosives story off the map (that is, until they do the same to some unsuspecting Americans) it also allows the GOP to turn every remaining campaign event into a bin Laden hate rally. It is, in short, the definitive October surprise.
What was it Rove said the other day when Sean Hannity asked him about October surprises? "We've got a couple of things we intend to spring." Something like that.
Best not to go there. I'm paranoid enough as it is.
John Kerry could, and probably will, use the Osama tape to remind the country that, three years and two wars later, the king of the evildoers, the man Sheriff Bush vowed to smoke out of his hole, is still roaming around free somewhere. Maybe the Democrats can recycle that ad they made after the third debate (the one the media ignored because they were still so deeply offended by Kerry's Mary-Cheney-is-a-lesbian gaffe) in which President denied having denied that he was worried about bin Laden's next move.
It's worth a try, anyway. But I don't think rational arguments are going to be of much use here. Osama's no slouch at information warfare. I'm sure he understands that the impact of a tape like this one on the mass mind is mainly subliminal, if not hormonal. By plastering his face over every TV in America for the next couple of days, he's given Bush a priceless gift -- a boogeyman with which to frighten that last sliver of undecided voters into rejecting change. Al Qaeda, it seems, has evolved into one hell of an effective 527 organization.