WASHINGTON - It's a river that exists only in the minds of political strategists, but it's the key body of water in the presidential campaign of 2004. The Democratic ticket, George W. Bush keeps saying, is "out of the mainstream" because of its stands on abortion, gay rights, guns and defense spending. The Kerry-Edwards team responds by saying the president and the Republicans dishonor "American values" with their policies on Iraq, taxes and social programs.
That's why the Democratic convention in Boston won't look anything like the recent fund-raiser at Radio City Music Hall in New York. Bill Clinton will speak, but there will be no crotch jokes from Whoopi Goldberg —indeed, no Hillary Rodham Clinton. You'll see lots of Vietnam veterans, including former Sen. Max Cleland, the triple amputee, war hero and Kerry friend. At the Republican convention you won't see Pat Robertson or Jerry Falwell in prime time (a mistake Bush's father made in Houston in 1992). You'll see the Bush family and California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, a social-issue liberal married to the Kennedy family.
The mainstream is going to be crowded.
Republicans think they have an advantage in the "mainstream" war on the issue of gay marriage. But they may have tossed it away this week. In proposing a constitutional amendment to define marriage only as "the union of a man and a woman," the GOP's goal was to put Democrats on the cultural defensive and to inspire religious conservatives who form the core of modern the party today. Instead, the White House and Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist have exposed divisions among Republicans and, through a well-meaning procedural mistake, allowed the Democratic ticket to wriggle free of the need to cast a potentially harmful vote on the matter.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/5436558
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