TRICKSTER!

What Kerry Should Do Tonight

Tonight John Kerry has a chance to re-ignite his bid for the White House. But to do that he has to get the President off his game, which will be to see how many times he can say "flip flop" in 90 minutes.

That's why Kerry should use his opening statement to dispense with the two principal issues that Republicans have used to portray Kerry as a waffler--Kerry's vote on the Iraq use of force resolution and his voting record on the $87 billion military appropriation.

He needs to say something like this:

"In Oct. 2002 it was important to get arms inspectors into Iraq because US intelligence believed that Iraq had WMDs. Without the threat of attack those inspectors were not going to allowed in. The use of force resolution opened Iraq to inspection. When the inspectors continued to report back that there were no WMDs, the President continued to insist that they were wrong and that we had to invade. The inspectors asked for US intelligence that would point them to the WMDs. The President provided that intelligence but the inspectors still found no WMDs. We now know that the Inspectors were right and the President was wrong. There were no stockpiles of WMDs. There were no active WMD programs. And there was no connection between Iraq and Al Qaeda. Had the president come back to Congress and the UN, worked in a bipartisan matter on a strategy, we would still have no WMDs in Iraq, we would have saved $200 billion, and more than 1000 American servicemen and women would still be alive today. That's why I voted for the use of force resolution then, and that's why I say now that it was the wrong war in the wrong place at the wrong time.

As to the infamous $87 billion that I supposedly voted for and against, here's the truth: I voted for a version of the $87 billion appropriated that would have given the troops all the money they needed but would also have allowed Congress to do its job and provide oversight in how that money was spent. I voted for a version of the $87 billion that contained no more give away, no-bid contracts for connected corporations. Instead, the Republicans in Congress killed that bill and presented another stripped of oversight and full of pork that would benefit the likes of Haliburton, the administrations' most favored corporation. That bill I voted against. The President would like to believe that Congress is just an appendage, there to do his bidding, but the founding fathers built in a system of checks and balances and it is the job of Senators to make sure that spending requests aren't loaded up with gifts to connected corporations. That's why I voted the way I did, and I was right to do so.

So, now that we've gotten these canards behind us, let's debate the future foreign policy of the nation."

After a statement like that, every time the President brings up the "flip flop" theme, Kerry will be able to say, "I've explained that, now what about policy?"

Smile at Last

Maybe it's better that Smile--the unfinished masterpiece that haunted Brian Wilson's career for the last 37 years--wasn't released as planned in January 1967.

If the record had hit the streets then, in the months before the Summer of Love and Sgt. Pepper's, it most certainly would have been misunderstood, dismissed as obtuse and inscrutable acid ravings as it was dismissed by the other Beach Boys. Sure there were gorgeous melodies and wildly inventive arrangements, but where was the single, and what was this shit that Van Dyke Parks was writing for lyrics? What did "columnated ruins domino" mean? The record probably would have hit the cut-out bins. Maybe it would have been laughed about years later as the Beach Boys' half-forgotten psychedelic record. Maybe over the years it would have garnered a cult reputation, something like the cult reputation it developed as bits and pieces of the lost masterpiece circulated on bootlegs and boxed sets.

Listening to the finished album now abstracted from the social context of 1967 it is obvious that the record was always sui generis, like nothing else of the 1960s or any other period of pop music. Aside from from some slow string glissandi and the rhythmically circular lyrics that bear the distinct stamp of hashish, the finished album isn't psychedelic at all. And now, in an era where arty, semi-commercial "pop" music by middle-aged men is not a radical undertaking, I hope this wonderful music will finally find a receptive audience beyond the acolytes.

No, Smile doesn't consist of discrete commercial songs. Instead, in it's final realization Smile consists of three suites of music with "Good Vibrations" tagged on to the end.

The first suite is the best known because its parts were mostly completed in 1966 and the original recordings have been floating around for years. The suite is built around the song "Heroes and Villians." It's a cinematic, abstract fantasia on themes of the American frontier and westward expansion filled out now with lyrics that were unfinished or at least unrecorded in 1966 and closing with Wilson's and Parks' "Cabin Essence," an indelibly pretty agrarian idyll.

The second suite will be a revelation for Smileologists. Built around two of Wilson's greatest melodies, "Wonderful" and "Surf's Up" the suite ties together parts that were scattered and incomplete for years with new music and lyrics for "Song For Children" and "Child is Father to the Man." The songs now form a coherent cycle of music and words about youth and innocence and growing up and moving on without abandoning the essential purity of childhood. It is the album's crowning achievement and I wonder if the 24-year old Wilson could have put this together or if it took a life of trouble and promises--some fulfilled, some not--for a 61-year-old Wilson to pull this off.

The final suite is a comic collection built around songs that relate, at least loosely, to the alchemical four elements. "Mrs. O'Leary's Cow," an instrumental devoted to the element of fire, is really creepy and intense, much scarier than the infamous 1966 version. But it is the chipper, jaunty "On A Holiday," with lyrics about pirates that were never recorded in 1966, that steals the suite.

I would have preferred the album if "Good Vibrations," the only song not composed with Van Dyke Parks specifically for Smile, had been left off the recording. Its lyrics don't jibe with the rest of the collection in style or substance. And the original pieces form a thematically coherent whole as the last of the four elements pieces harkens back to material from the "Heroes and Villains" suite bringing things to a tidy close.

Still, after 37 years it was worth the wait.

Stop the Buck Passing!

George Bush was supposed to the be management president. The MBA-in-chief. Our national CEO.

But somehow, every time a major failing takes place in his organization, it's never the head guy's fault. Abu Ghraib wasn't his fault. An average 79,000 jobs a month in net losses isn't his fault. Too few troops sent to Iraq and disinformation on WMD from Chalabi under a Defense Department contract weren't his fault. Failure to plan for post invasion guerrilla warfare in Iraq wasn't his fault. That the government failed to stop the Sept. 11 plot even thought the FBI had Zacharias Moussaoui in custody and possessed intelligence that Al Qaeda was ready to act wasn't his fault.

Now comes the story that the FBI has failed to translate 120,000 hours of terrorist communication intercepts and discarded others because of management ineptitude.

Again, I'm sure, Bush apologists will point their fingers at FBI director Robert Mueller and say it's not the President's fault. But at some point the buck passing has to stop in the Oval Office. It is the President who sets the priorities and the President who sets the tone for the administration. A tough, can-do leader would make sure those intercepts were being translated by his primary domestic intelligence agency. But Bush is neither a leader, nor tough, nor can-do. He is a lightweight ideologue who has no control of his organization and no agenda besides the talking points his handlers pass him. Worse, he seems to have a near-pathological inability to stand up and say "I'm responsible." It should be no surprise that a man who has spent half of his Presidency on his ranch in Texas has set a tone of lax unconcern and mismanagement.

Earlier this month the Vice President suggested that if we voted for John Kerry "the danger is that we'll get hit again and we'll be hit in a way that will be devastating from the standpoint of the United States." But I'll tell you what really creates the danger that we will get hit again--allowing 120,000 hours of Al Qaeda intercepts to go untranslated, and even worse, allowing some of those untranslated intercepts to be deleted from the FBI's system! Let's not forget that on Sept. 10, 2001 the NSA had in its possession similar intercepts saying "Tomorrow is zero hour," intercepts that went untranslated until days after the towers came down.

I'm furious that something like this could happen. And I'm even more furious that the President will certainly again duck responsibility for it.

If It Were Up To Me

I would have thrown Cat Stevens out of the country for recording "Morning Is Broken"!

John Kerry, Health Care, and Job Growth

Since the Reagan administration Republicans have been peddling a line to the American public that lowering interest rates while cutting taxes (income taxes, capital gains taxes, other taxes investments and savings) will make the economy grow, spurring re-investment in business and thereby stimulating job growth. If you make spending money available to consumers and businesses, the argument goes, jobs will be created and any tax shortfall will be made up for by new money created by economic growth.

However, the last 25 years of practice have proved that the theory doesn't work for the average laborer. Freeing up capital does spur consumer spending, and it does improve corporate profits and balance sheets. But the last three years of tax cuts and historically low interest rates have shown again that boosting the supply of money does not inevitably lead to corporate hiring.

Anyone who takes an honest look at the disastrous labor market of the Bush years (an average net monthly job loss of more than 79,000!) will see that the biggest drag on hiring has been the cost of benefits. Health care and retirement costs are a burden that corporate America is no longer willing to bear. Until some solution is found for covering or at least lowering those costs we will continue to live in an America where good, well-paid, full-time employment is harder and harder to find.

George Bush has attacked John Kerry's proposed rollback of the temporary income tax cuts on people making $200,000 a year or more by saying "raising taxes will stifle job creation." But in fact the Kerry plan is designed to do just the opposite. Kerry's plan directly addresses one of the nation's major job creation needs--reducing the cost of health benefits.

Under Kerry's plan a portion of the revenue generated by the rollback will be used to create a federal reinsurance pool that will backstop businesses that incur big-ticket, catastrophic health claims. The plan would cover 75 percent of medical bills over $50,000 for companies that extend coverage to all workers and have preventive care programs in place.

It's an innovative, reasonable, problem-solving idea that represents a new kind of thinking about how the government can help businesses and individuals at the same time.

A study published last month in the journal Inquiry, found that a plan like the one Kerry has proposed would reduce premiums by around 6% immediately and can reduce the risk of sudden variance in expenses by 50% which could further reduce premiums (since risk is the primary factor that drives premium prices upwards).

Can the tax rollbacks pay for Kerry's plan? It's hard to know for sure. Last month economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman quoted Emory University's Kenneth Thorpe as saying Kerry's plan will cost $653 billion over the next 10 years while the Tax Policy Center estimates the revenue from the tax cuts at $631 billion over the same period. That leaves Kerry $22 billion short. It's a short fall that President Kerry will have to address. But the actual job and wage creation that will result from lower insurance premiums will certainly help make up some of the difference. And as Krugman noted, Kerry's problem of filling that $22 billion gap is nothing compared to the problem Bush would have in a second term--a $2.8 trillion hole that will be created if his tax cuts are made permanent.

Meanwhile, Bush's employee health care plan is to offer expanded health saving accounts with which individuals can pay directly for their health care with pre-tax dollars. The plan would not address the costs of catastrophic health problems, which would still be covered by traditional insurance and which are the biggest inflator of prices. It would not add stability to the insurance system, which is the biggest inflator of insurance premiums. And the only drag on costs contemplated by that plan is the theoretical one that consumers will chose to buy less health care when they are responsible for paying directly for it—-in other words, the nation will save money pushing people to get less health care. There goes that good ol' compassionate conservatism again!

Gee Whiz, You Can Do it In a Blog!

My compadre Tom Watson has a great post today on all the blogophilic back-slapping going on over the role of blogs and bloggers in the Dan Rather reporting scandal.

As usual Tom got it mostly right. Harry MacDougald's deconstruction of the typeface used in the disputed memos passed through the Internet like a plate of bad clams. That network effect velocity certainly gave his blog-posted critique more attention that it might have gotten in another scenario, say had it been passed around similar but less cybercentric partisan circles and ultimately been given an airing some other way-- a letter to all the major news media, a phone call to Rush Limbaugh. But the distinction that it was posted to a blog and passed around the Internet is neither revolutionary nor big news. It reminds me of the days when Tom and I and our Cybertimes editor Rob Fixmer laughed at how all the non-tech editors at the Times fell for the gee whiz stories--hey, you can buy stuff on the Internet! Hey, you can find a date on the Internet! Hey, you can question the accuracy of a CBS news story on the Internet!

That CBS News apparently got snowed by forged memos is a valid, newsworthy story. (Unfortunately for the profession I once practiced, scandalously bad journalism has become a chronic disease--Stephen Glass, Jayson Blair, The NYT reporting in the Wen Ho Lee case, everybody's single-sourced, Chalabi-planted phony Iraq WMD stories, the Vietnam nerve gas story CNN ran a few years back, Judith Cooke's Pulitzer Prize winner about an 8-year-old heroin addict who never existed).

Credit for the forensic typography should be duly given to MacDougald (unless he's the source of the forgeries or knows the source of the forgeries...nothing would surprise me anymore), but it's not an unusual way for bad journalism to surface--to have a reader or viewer call to someone's attention the flaws in a report. The glee in the blogosphere over the fact that it happened among bloggers is the kind of gee whiz reaction I would have expected from "Big Media" back in 1996!

Blogging does not represent a media revolution. It is an evolutionary step forward in form but not function from Usenet and listserv, the tools we used in the early days to further distribution of asynchronous news, information, and conversation on a variety of subjects. Those tools did spark the creation of a citizens media--something Tom has written about both knowledgeably and passionately for years in @NY, The Industry Standard, inside.com. At least as early as June 1998 Tom wrote "this is not a mass medium but a medium of the masses." And I remember lecturing at the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism around the same time, telling the nascent reporters that the nature of their jobs was going to change because soon everyone would be reporting the facts of their own lives. In fact we were both right, and a platform for information and opinion that would otherwise not have an outlet did spring up as did a means by which geographically scattered audiences for niche information could be assembled. But, as Tom notes about the most-read blogs, web-published, national political commentary--identical in style and substance to what you hear on Cross-Fire or read in Commentary--by moonlighting professional journalists is hardly the harbinger of a profound change.

What Tom discounts however is the impact of blog self-publishing on traditional print media. Like all of Internet media, blogging creates competition by adding yet another new medium to divert eyeballs. And the better job blogs do in producing new information (not just commentary on someone else's information) the more of a diversion they will be. But unless people start charging for blogs the impact may be worse for the journalists than it will be for the media conglomerates. Through the magic of blogs journalists now get to do for free what they used to be paid to do!

Yes it's important and interesting that somone caught Dan Rather. No, it's not important, and it's only slightly interesting that the person published his "gotcha" on a blog.

Smile Again

A few months back I wrote about Brian Wilson's decision to revisit his lost 1967 masterpiece Smile!, more than 35 years later finishing a work of art he abandoned at the height of his fame, and the height of the 60s in a fit of paranoid acid mania, explosive mental illness, the ongoing disapproval of his band, and crippling self-doubt from which he never fully recovered.

It's a rare feat, one I'm not sure has happened before--a major artist returning to a famous, abandoned lost work after a generation. It's as if Franz Schubert had lived more than six years after apparently abandoning his 8th symphony's two glorious movements and was finally able to complete it.

Well, the newly recreated, recorded and complete Smile!
is set for release on the 28th of this month. I've been listening to excepts from the album on the Smile! website. And it sounds great. Wilson's voice, unfortunately, is nothing like it was, gone in particular is the soaring boy's-choir-meets-doo-wop falsetto, and even the natural-range parts have a craggy ruined quality, not nearly as ragged or emotionally devastated but a little akin to the sound of late Billie Holiday. Still Wilson has accrued a group of acolytes so deeply engaged in his music that their devotion to recreating and reanimating Smile! borders on the religious. Darian Sahanaja, Wilson's "musical secretary" analyzed all the archival tapes, transcribing parts to create scores; and he worked with Wilson and lyricist Van Dyke Parks to complete parts of the original album that had been left unfinished.

Fanatics will argue forever about the relative merits of the versions of songs completed in 1967 and those rerecorded today. The sheer beauty of songs like "Cabin Essence" (two words now where once it was one) certainly are diminished by the decay of Wilson's voice. But no one should be disappointed by the version of "Surf's Up" one of Wilson's greatest ever songs and finally put right in a complete instrumental arrangement as majestic and achingly pretty as any music Wilson ever wrote. Even if the new recording fudges the famous, ridiculously high falsetto melissma on the line "columnated ruins domino"--assigning the part to background singers and fading Wilson back in the mix.

Wilson will be bringing a Smile! roadshow to the US at the end of the month. He'll be here in New York for two shows in October that will include complete performances of Smile! I'll be there the first night and it's a show I insisted that my 13 year old, a fan of Pet Sounds comes to see.

Beautiful Dreamer-The Songs of Stephen Foster

It's a school boy truth, universally taught and acknowledged, that Stephen Foster was the first great American songwriter. He was also the first man to try to make a full time profession of writing popular tunes. Oscillating between up tempo songs that appropriated black identity, dance numbers, and sentimental ballads, Foster set the model for American pop that remains in effect today. His 150-year-old songs are woven into the fabric of American life and have become essential to the American identity--"Beautiful Dreamer," "Old Folks at Home" (aka 'Swanee River'), "My Old Kentucky Home," "Camptown Races," "Oh! Susanna," "Jeannie with The Light Brown Hair."

But the performance of Foster's work remains controversial because, among the list of songs mentioned above, all but the first and the last are part of the blackface minstrel tradition. No one today performs these lines from "Oh Susanna":

I jump'd aboard the telegraph
And trabbled down de ribber,
De lectrick fluid magnified,
And kill'd five hundred Nigga.

And the word "darkie" is inevitably replaced by a variety of paler substitutes when "Old Folks at Home" is performed.

In recent years, thanks to the academic work of writers like Dale Cockrell, W.T. Lhamon Jr, William Mahar, and Eric Lott, blackface minstrelsy has become a subject much examined and better understood. It was, after all, American's first indigenous pop culture craze, the well-spring not only of the sound of our popular music but also of its modes of commercialization and industrialization. Like it or not folks, it all descends from blackface minstrelsy, and if you don't hear that explicitly in the music of, say, The Red Hot Chili Peppers or Eminem you aren't listening.

Stephen Foster wasn't the first American to yoke vernacular black English to Anglo-Celtic melodies. That credit belongs Micah Hawkins, owner of an hotel/saloon around New York's Five Points. In 1815 Hawkins bashed out a song called "Backside Albany" about a naval battle in the War of 1812. The song was written in crude dialect ("to be sung in the character of a Negro sailor," Hawkins instructed), and set to an old Irish fiddle tune. Nor was Foster the author of the genre's best known work, "Dixie's Land" composed, purportedly, by blackface minstrel Dan Emmett for a stage review in 1859.

But Foster was the first man to make it a life's work to fuse the high and the low. Soon after the enormous success of “Oh Susanna” in 1848, Foster abandoned dialect and began to write songs with black narrators who speak with the same emotional depth and dignity as whites. That assertion is a major part of Ken Emerson's rehabilitation of Foster's blackface songs in his brilliant 1997 book Doo-dah! Stephen Foster and the Rise of American Popular Culture. The book remains essential reading for anyone with an interest in American music. If I were to teach a course in rock and roll, I would start with Doo-dah!

The case for Foster is beautifully made by neo-blues singer/guitarist Alvin Youngblood Hart's version of "Nelly Was A Lady" on the new collection of Foster's work Beautiful Dreamer-The Songs of Stephen Foster recently released by the fledgling American Roots Publishing label. The song, written in 1849 is a breakthrough fusion of the era's two popular forms—the crude, male minstrel song and the sentimental, female parlor ballad. "Nelly" is a lament for a dead spouse, the type of maudlin, emotionally manipulative material that was common fodder for the mid 19th century's parlor ballads, songs meant to be sung and played in drawing rooms by white women. But "Nelly" has a black male narrator, not a white one, and he refers to Nelly as a lady not in jest but with tenderness, regret, and loss. It's a great song, and Youngblood delivers a guitar and mando performance that is simple, restrained and indelible. The plainspoken, straight ahead performance illustrates just how short the distance is between Stephen Foster and today's alt-country and folkie Americana acts.

Anthologies of contemporary artists performing Foster's songs are nothing new, but Beautiful Dreamer, flawed as it is, remains the best of the lot. The CD features 18 artists performing some of Foster's best material--most of it well known, some of it obscure. Raul Malo's "Beautiful Dreamer" calls to mind the obvious influence of Italian bel canto on Foster and sounds like a performance by the ghost of Roy Orbison. A jumping version of "Camptown Races" by The Duhks has a a suggestion of junkanoo, propelled by banjo and bongos. Mavis Staples' gospel take on "Hard Times Come Again No More" is obvious but no less effective for that (her voice is a national treasure). John Prine's "My Old Kentucky Home" is perfect, urban folk as comfortable as an old flannel shirt. But the ringer is an obscure dialect song about cock fighting written late in Foster's life (when he was living in penury and drinking himself to death) called "Don't Bet Money on the Shanghai." The song is given a rollicking, Wilcoesque performance by alt-country group BR5-49.

Some of the other performances don't quite make it. Roger McGuinn's "Jeanie With the Light Brown Hair" is marred by an incongruous bass and drum part and is sung without conviction. Michelle Shocked reharmonizes and rearranges "Oh Susanna" into a Band-styled rock gospel blues that is just plain bad.

Still, the material is great, most of the performances are very good, and hours after listening the music lingers "borne like a vapor on the summer air."

The Fear President

Craven, despicable, transparent fear-mongering--that is what the Bush administration has finally resorted to in it's re-election campaign. Throughout the Republican National Convention the implied theme was a threat--that a vote for John Kerry was a vote for Al Qaeda. Yesterday the Vice President made it explicit. "It's absolutely essential that eight weeks from today, on November 2, we make the right choice, because if we make the wrong choice then the danger is that we'll get hit again and we'll be hit in a way that will be devastating from the standpoint of the United States," Cheney told a small crowd of supporters in Iowa.

It shouldn't need to be said, but it does, that the attacks of Sept. 11 happened not under a John Kerry administration but almost a full year into George Bush's presidential tenure, at a time when the FBI had one of the hijackers in custody in Minnesota and when the President's top expert on Al Qaeda was warning that an attack was imminent. The Clinton Administration, by contrast, had less information and far less lead time when it acted to thwart the Millennium bombing. The Bush Administration has already demonstrably failed to protect American citizens from a domestic attack. It made terrorism a low priority and so dropped the ball on warning signs that might have thwarted Sept. 11 in the first place. Since then, Bush administration policies to cease engaging Palestinians in the search for a negotiated settlement to their conflict with the Israelis, to refuse unilateral negotiations over nuclear weapons in Iran and North Korea, and to invade Iraq (creating enmity among potential and necessary Arab allies in the fight against Al Qaeda) have further destabilized the world and endangered American interests and safety.

If anything a vote for George Bush is a vote for a less safe world; a vote for a President who already allowed a devastating attack to occur. But even I wouldn't say a vote for George Bush means "we'll get hit again...in a way that will be devastating...." That would be offensive, simple-minded, uncivil, the sign of a person who would say or do anything to benefit himself. I'm not that kind of person.

The nation should by now be disabused of the notion that the Bush administration believes in any restraint where political benefit is possible. Fabricated proxy attacks on Kerry's war record (mirroring an identical strategy used against John McCain in the 2000 Republican primaries) were honorable compared to the explicit warning that a vote for Kerry is a vote for a devastating terrorist attack. That the administration would use security threat levels and alerts to try to dampen voter turn out in target cities like New York and other regions with large Democratic electorates, no longer seems far-fetched, nor does the use of voter intimidation tactics or flat out fraud in states with electronic voting methods where no paper back-up exists to be re-counted.

One more contrast is a worthy one to draw, between President Bush and another president who served during a time of economic woe, net job losses, and sneak attacks on the homeland. This is what Franklin Roosevelt had to say at the time of his first inauguration:

This is preeminently the time to speak the truth, the whole truth, frankly and boldly. Nor need we shrink from honestly facing conditions in our country today. This great Nation will endure as it has endured, will revive and will prosper. So, first of all, let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself—nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.

What John Kerry Needs to Do to Win

The conventions are over. There are 60 days to go until Election Day. It's a neck and neck race. So what does John Kerry need to do to get elected in November? I say he needs to do these three things:

1. Declare War on Al Qaeda
Kerry needs to expunge the phrase "war on terrorism" from his vocabulary. It's a blinding catch-all that George Bush has used to mask and justify a variety of initiatives--from the invasion and occupation of Iraq to the erosion of freedom of information laws, initiatives that have nothing to do with destroying the enemy that actually attacked us.
Kerry needs to be able to clearly draw a line between the appropriate war on Al Qaeda--which he should pledge to destroy using every tool at our disposal-- and Bush's "war on terrorism," turning around the terms and forcing Bush to answer to the failures in the war to destroy Al Qaeda ($100+ billion dollars spent and still we're on high alert and still we haven't caught Osama Bin Laden and the war in Iraq has alienated us from what little Arab support we may have had in the war on Al Qaeda). Every time Bush evokes the invasion of Iraq or some other far flung part of the "war on terrorism" he should have do explain how those actions have helped defeat Al Qaeda.

2. Relentlessly Slam the Bush Record on Jobs & Poverty
George W. Bush is the first president since Herbert Hoover to preside over a net loss of jobs during a 4-year term. Hoover had an excuse, The Great Depression. Bush lost jobs during a recovery! It was a recovery of higher corporate profits, lower taxes for the rich, but fewer jobs for average Americans. But that's always been the Republican agenda--grow corporate profits at the expense of costly things--like jobs, wages, health and retirement benefits that actually affect the majority of the population.
Furthermore, last year alone the number of Americans living in poverty grew by 1.3 million, 800.000 of whom were children. 12.9 million children now live in poverty. George Bush likes to characterize himself as a "compassionate conservative" but what kind of compassion is it when the richest country in the world cuts taxes for the wealthy while allowing 12.9 million to live in poverty? Apparently that's Bush's compassionate kind of conservativism.

3. Tell People You're a Uniter, not a Divider
Four years ago George Bush said he wanted to be a "uniter, not a divider" then he proceeded to serve as the most divisive president since the civil war. Kerry needs to turn those words against Bush. He has 20 years in the Senate where he's actually been a uniter, working across the aisle like when he broke party lines to back the Gramm-Rudman Deficit Reduction Act. The contrast is stark and appealing. Kerry should lean on it.