Exit poll data at CNN.com.
| MOST IMPORTANT ISSUE | BUSH | KERRY |
| Education (4%) | 25% | 75% |
| Taxes (5%) | 56% | 44% |
| Health Care (8%) | 22% | 78% |
| Iraq (15%) | 25% | 74% |
| Terrorism (19%) | 86% | 14% |
| Economy/Jobs (20%) | 18% | 80% |
| Moral Values (22%) | 79% | 18% |
| SIZE OF COMMUNITY | BUSH | KERRY |
| Urban (30%) | 43% | 56% |
| Suburban (46%) | 51% | 48% |
| Rural (24%) | 56% | 43% |
“Kerry Concedes Race to Bush” — Calvin Woodward and Ron Fournier (AP) in The Minneapolis Star-Tribune, 11/3/04:
President Bush won a second term from a divided and anxious nation, his promise of steady, strong wartime leadership trumping John Kerry’s fresh-start approach to Iraq and joblessness. After a long, tense night of vote counting, the Democrat called Bush today to concede Ohio and the presidency, The Associated Press learned.
Kerry ended his quest, concluding one of the most expensive and bitterly contested races on record, with a call to the president shortly after 10 a.m. Minnesota time, according to two officials familiar with the conversation.
“Study: Iraqi Civilian Deaths Increase Dramatically After Invasion” — Tim Parsons in The Johns Hopkins Gazette, 11/1/04:
Civilian deaths have risen dramatically in Iraq since the country was invaded in March 2003, according to a survey conducted by researchers from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, Columbia University School of Nursing and Al-Mustansiriya University in Baghdad.
The researchers found that the majority of deaths were attributed to violence, which were primarily the result of military actions by Coalition forces. Most of those killed by Coalition forces were women and children. However, the researchers stressed that they found no evidence of improper conduct by the Coalition soldiers.
The survey is the first countrywide attempt to calculate the number of civilian deaths in Iraq since the war began. The United States military does not keep records on civilian deaths, and record keeping by the Iraq Ministry of Health is limited. The study is published in the Oct. 29 online edition of The Lancet.
“Our findings need to be independently verified with a larger sample group. However, I think our survey demonstrates the importance of collecting civilian casualty information during a war and that it can be done,” said lead author Les Roberts, an associate with the Bloomberg School of Public Health’s Center for International Emergency, Disaster and Refugee Studies.
The researchers conducted their survey in September 2004. They randomly selected 33 neighborhoods of 30 homes from across Iraq and interviewed the residents about the number and ages of the people living in each home. More than 7,800 Iraqis were included. Residents were questioned about the number of births and deaths that had occurred in the household since January 2002. Information was also collected about the causes and circumstances of each death. When possible, the deaths were verified with a death certificate or other documentation.
The researchers compared the mortality rate among civilians in Iraq during the 14.6 months prior to the March 2003 invasion with the 17.8-month period following the invasion. The sample group reported 46 deaths prior to March 2003 and 142 deaths following the invasion. The results were calculated twice, both with and without information from the city of Falluja. The researchers felt the excessive violence from combat in Falluja could skew the overall mortality rates. Excluding information from Falluja, they estimate that 100,000 more Iraqis died than would have been expected had the invasion not occurred. Eighty-four percent of the deaths were reported to be caused by the actions of Coalition forces, and 95 percent of those deaths were due to air strikes and artillery. “There is a real necessity for accurate monitoring of civilian deaths during combat situations. Otherwise it is impossible to know the extent of the problems civilians may be facing or how to protect them,” said study co-author Gilbert Burnham, associate professor of international health at the Bloomberg School and director of the Center for International, Disaster and Refugee Studies.
“Voting Story” — Paul Ford at ftrain.com, 11/1/04:
I was talking with a good friend of mine about the weather. “Vote,” she said.
“Vote?” I said. “Vote vote vote vote, vote vote.”
“Vote vote?”
“Vote!”
We talked about how tired we both had become. “Vote vote vote vote, vote vote,” I said. “Vote,” she replied, commiserating.
I thought about it for a moment. “Vote,” I said. “Vote, vote vote.” She nodded in agreement.
“Bush Endorses Kerry” — Newshounds.us, 10/27/04:
At a GOP campaign event in Lancaster, PA, Bush said: “This investigation is important & it’s ongoing, & a political candidate who jumps to conclusions without knowing the facts is not a person you want as your commander in chief.” The crowd cheered, as they always do.
“36 Papers Abandon Bush for Kerry” — Howard Kurtz in The Washington Post, 10/27/04:
The Orlando Sentinel has backed every Republican seeking the White House since Richard M. Nixon in 1968. Not this time.
“This president has utterly failed to fulfill our expectations,” the Florida paper said in supporting John F. Kerry, prompting some angry calls and a few dozen cancellations.
“A lot of people thought they could trust that the Sentinel would always go Republican, and when that didn’t happen, they felt betrayed,” said Jane Healy, the paper’s editorial page editor.
The Sentinel is among 36 newspapers that endorsed President Bush four years ago and have flip-flopped, to coin a phrase, into Kerry’s corner. These include the Chicago Sun-Times, the Los Angeles Daily News and the Memphis Commercial Appeal, according to industry magazine Editor & Publisher. Bush has won over only six papers that backed Al Gore, including the Denver Post, which received 700 letters — all of them protesting the move.
Nine more papers, including the Cleveland Plain Dealer yesterday, abandoned Bush after four years but did not support the Massachusetts senator. Instead, these papers — the Detroit News, the Tampa Tribune and the New Orleans Times-Picayune among them — threw up their collective hands and made no endorsement.
“I’m Backing Sharon” — Jonathan Freedland in The Guardian, 10/27/04:
If you can judge a man by the enemies he keeps, then Ariel Sharon is someone in urgent need of a reappraisal. Reviled for two decades as the Bulldozer, the embodiment of the intransigent Israeli right, yesterday he became something else – the unlikeliest standard bearer for those who yearn for progress in the Middle East.
You only had to look at those denouncing him, as he won an emphatic 67-45 vote in favour of his planned pullout from Gaza in the Knesset last night. The most zealous of the settlers, parading their children in their thousands outside the parliament, condemning the prime minister for the treachery of giving away land that, they insist, was bequeathed to the Jews by the Almighty Himself; the theocratic rabbis, ruling that all those who believe in the Torah are divinely compelled to oppose the PM; the nationalist politicians, heckling Sharon from the back of the Knesset chamber, telling this hawk of all hawks to “go home”.
Ariel Sharon has become public enemy number one to Israel’s far right, which is why, if only temporarily, he deserves the support of the left – in Israel and beyond. In Israel, they gave it. It was not just the decision by Labour’s 19 Knesset members, joined by the left-wing Meretz party, to back Sharon, in a bid to cancel out the almost equivalent number – nearly half – of his own Likud MKs who voted against him. It was also the sentiment of the wider peace movement, believing that – bizarre as it may seem – Sharon was, in this specific contest at least, their champion. The result was some surreal politics: witness the Peace Now demonstration addressed by Ehud Olmert, none other than Sharon’s deputy.
There is more to this than the simple calculus of “my enemy’s enemy”. By pushing for a Gaza withdrawal, whatever his long-term motives, Sharon is finally beginning a process which Israel’s doves – to say nothing of the outside world – have sought for nearly four decades. At long last, Israel is proposing to rid itself of part of the territory it won in 1967. Not all of it, not even most of it, but some of it. And that, after 37 years of policy in the opposite direction, constantly tightening Israel’s hold on those lands, is one of the most significant moments in the country’s history.
It is true that Sharon’s destination is not the same as that of the Israeli peace camp. He wants to give away Gaza in return for keeping large chunks of the rest of the occupied territories. He said as much on Monday: his aim was to “strengthen Israel’s grip over the land that is crucial to our existence” – in other words, parts of the West Bank.
He may even believe, as his chief of staff said in an interview earlier this month, that this is the best way to put the peace process with the Palestinians into “formaldehyde”, putting off the prospect of a genuine Palestinian state “indefinitely”.
The peacemaking left see things differently. For them, the Gaza withdrawal is the first move in a process that would see the bulk of the 1967 territories handed to the Palestinians. Put simply, the peace camp’s plan is Gaza first. Sharon’s plan may well be Gaza last.
Despite that vast difference in long-term objectives, progressives understand they have to be on Sharon’s side for now. His destination may be A, theirs may be Z, but the first step is the same – and, right now, he is the one with the power to make it. If only for this first step, the Gaza pullout, Sharon and the doves must walk together.
“Making Things Worse” — Editorial, New York Times, 10/26/04:
President Bush’s misbegotten invasion of Iraq appears to have achieved what Saddam Hussein did not: putting dangerous weapons in the hands of terrorists and creating an offshoot of Al Qaeda in Iraq.
The murder of dozens of Iraqi Army recruits over the weekend is being attributed to the forces of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who has been identified by the Bush administration as a leading terrorist and a supposed link between Iraq and Al Qaeda. That was not true before the war – as multiple investigations have shown. But the breakdown of order since the invasion has changed all that. This terrorist, who has claimed many attacks on occupation forces and the barbaric murder of hostages, recently swore allegiance to Osama bin Laden and renamed his group Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia.
The hideous murder of the recruits was a reminder of the Bush administration’s dangerously inflated claims about training an Iraqi security force. The officials responsible for these inexperienced young men sent them home for leave without weapons or guards, at a time when police and army recruits are constantly attacked. The men who killed them wore Iraqi National Guard uniforms.
A particularly horrific case of irony involves weapons of mass destruction. It’s been obvious for months that American forces were not going to find the chemical or biological armaments that Mr. Bush said were stockpiled in Iraq. What we didn’t know is that while they were looking for weapons that did not exist, they lost weapons that did.
James Glanz, William J. Broad and David E. Sanger reported in The Times yesterday that some 380 tons of the kinds of powerful explosives used to destroy airplanes, demolish buildings, make missile warheads and trigger nuclear weapons have disappeared from one of the many places in Iraq that the United States failed to secure. The United Nations inspectors disdained by the Bush administration had managed to monitor the explosives for years. But they vanished soon after the United States took over the job. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was so bent on proving his theory of lightning warfare that he ignored the generals who said an understaffed and underarmed invasion force could rush to Baghdad, but couldn’t hold the rest of the country, much less guard things like the ammunition dump.
Iraqi and American officials cannot explain how some 760,000 pounds of explosives were spirited away from a well-known site just 30 miles from Baghdad. But they were warned. Within weeks of the invasion, international weapons inspectors told Washington that the explosives depot was in danger and that terrorists could help themselves “to the greatest explosives bonanza in history.”
The disastrous theft was revealed in a recent letter to an international agency in Vienna. It was signed by the general director of Iraq’s Planning and Following Up Directorate. It’s too bad the Bush administration doesn’t have one of those.
“The Road to Abu Ghraib” — Phillip Carter in The Washington Monthly, November 2004:
There’s a reason why most of the investigations into Abu Ghraib have punted on the essential question of executive responsibility. To judge the administration’s decisions to have been wrong, after all, requires us to discern what the right decisions would have been. And to do that, we must put ourselves in their shoes. Given the particular conditions faced by the president and his deputies after 9/11—a war against terrorists, in which the need to extract intelligence via interrogations was intensely pressing, but the limits placed by international law on interrogation techniques were very constricting—did those leaders have better alternatives than the one they chose? The answer is that they did. And we will be living with the consequences of the choices they made for years to come.
“Believe” — Thomas F. Schaller at gadflyer.com, 10/26/04:
I believe in President George W. Bush. I’ve always believed him.
I believe the president invaded Iraq to secure liberty and democracy for the Iraqi people. I believe he had compelling evidence that Iraq was a significant threat to America and the world, and presented that evidence in a complete and balanced manner. Like 42 percent of Americans – and 62 percent of Republicans – I believe Saddam Hussein was involved in the September 11 attacks.
I believe we have enough troops on the ground in Iraq to ensure stability. I believe the rising American fatality rates, the rising casualty rates, and the rising American share of those coalition fatalities and casualties testify to the undeniable progress we’re making there. I believe it is inappropriate and traitorous, however, for the media to broadcast pictures of American flag-draped caskets returning from Iraq.
I believed then-candidate Bush when he said during the 2000 campaign that America should not nation-build, and believe him now when he says our nation was divinely chosen for this task. I believe, as the president claims, that “free societies are peaceful societies,” but that the political and civil rights in oppressive, undemocratic countries like Saudi Arabia and Pakistan are exempt from this standard. I believe Iraqis view Americans as liberators, and that once this swift, cheap war concludes the world will be more stable, our allies more cooperative, and our enemies fewer and less threatening. . . .
I believe the president when he says he would have moved “heaven and earth” had he any “inkling” that terrorists were planning to attack America with hijacked airplanes. I believe the security briefing the president read five weeks before the attacks – which was entitled “Bin Laden Determined to Strike Inside United States,” and specifically mentioned hijacked airplanes and New York City as a target – was an inkling-free, “historical” document. I believe we should re-double our investments in a missile defense system, which could have prevented the 9/11 attacks and will prevent future attacks like it from occurring.
I believe the president was right to oppose the formation of the 9/11 Commission, to change his mind but then oppose fully funding it, to change his mind but then oppose granting its request for an extension, to change his mind but refuse to testify for more than an hour, to change his mind but then testify alongside Vice President Dick Cheney so long as transcripts and note-taking were prohibited. I believe the investigation into the Abu Ghraib prison scandal shows it was the fault of a handful of misguided underlings who simply misunderstood a memo signed by the Secretary of Defense which authorized the use of dogs to interrogate prisoners. . . .
Make no mistake: I believe that President Bush, just as he promised he would, has restored honor and integrity to the White House and united us as Americans.
“The Post’s Endorsement of President Bush for Re-Election” — Denver Post, 10/26/04:
Editor’s note: More than 700 readers have given us their thoughts on Sunday’s presidential endorsement, and they add up to a passionate dissent. An endorsement is meant to provide the newspaper’s perspective and to stimulate readers’ consideration of issues and candidates. Most readers look over the paper’s analysis and then draw their own conclusions, as today’s letters certainly demonstrate. Every letter we received was critical of the Post endorsement; we publish a sampling here today.
“Kerry for President” — editorial, The Orlando Sentinel, 10/25/04:
Four years ago, the Orlando Sentinel endorsed Republican George W. Bush for president based on our trust in him to unite America. We expected him to forge bipartisan solutions to problems while keeping this nation secure and fiscally sound.
This president has utterly failed to fulfill our expectations. We turn now to his Democratic challenger, Sen. John Kerry, with the belief that he is more likely to meet the hopes we once held for Mr. Bush.
Our choice was not dictated by partisanship. Already this election season, the Sentinel has endorsed Republican Mel Martinez for the U.S. Senate and four U.S. House Republicans. In 2002, we backed Republican Gov. Jeb Bush for re-election, repeating our endorsement of four years earlier. Indeed, it has been 40 years since the Sentinel endorsed a Democrat — Lyndon Johnson — for president. . . .
Mr. Bush has abandoned the core values we thought we shared with him — keeping the nation strong while ensuring that its government is limited, accountable and fiscally responsible.
We trust Mr. Kerry not to make the mistakes Mr. Bush has.
Mr. Kerry’s two decades of experience in the U.S. Senate have given him a solid grounding in both foreign and domestic policy. There is no disputing his liberal record representing Massachusetts, but we believe he has moved to the middle. In this campaign, he has put forth a moderate platform with fiscal discipline at its core.
Despite his differences with Mr. Bush over the wisdom of the war, Mr. Kerry recognizes the imperative of securing and stabilizing Iraq. He would intensify efforts to enlist more foreign help, and speed up training of Iraqi forces and reconstruction in the country.
Mr. Kerry would bolster national security by adding 40,000 troops to the overstretched U.S. military, and doubling its special forces. He would accelerate the program that secures nuclear material in the former Soviet Union before it can fall into the hands of terrorists.
Mr. Kerry would enhance homeland security by doing more to protect ports and other vulnerable facilities. Unlike Mr. Bush, he understands that government accountability and civil liberties must not be needlessly compromised in the name of the war on terrorism.
Mr. Kerry’s health plan would extend coverage to 27 million Americans, more than three times as many as Mr. Bush’s plan. Contrary to what the president has been saying on the campaign trail, Mr. Kerry’s plan would be voluntary, and include private-sector options for coverage.
Also to Mr. Kerry’s credit, he has pledged to strengthen environmental protections. His energy plan would do far more to promote conservation and alternative fuels.
Mr. Kerry proposes to pay for all of his plans, primarily by repealing tax cuts for Americans earning more than $200,000. He has not called for tax increases on middle-income Americans.
Mr. Kerry has committed himself to reinstating pay-as-you-go rules that helped turn deficits into surpluses during the 1990s. Such rules would force him to scale back his plans if he can’t pay for them.
In sum, we believe Mr. Kerry would be a more bipartisan and effective leader than Mr. Bush. In the Nov. 2 general election, the Sentinel endorses John Kerry for president of the United States.