Kerry: "I'm going straight to the White House"

[Bush_Eats_Beef]

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/_/id/6539090?pageid=rs.Politics&pageregion=single4&rnd=1097588324609&has-player=false

"I'm going straight to the White House," John Kerry says. "I'm thrilled with where the campaign is right now." Just ninety minutes earlier, on this warm afternoon in late September, he stood on an outdoor stage at the University of Pennsylvania campus in downtown Philadelphia and gazed out onto a sea of 20,000 supporters. The school had hosted only one other rally this big in recent memory -- when Bill Clinton came through on his re-election tour in 1996. It's heady stuff when a first-time presidential candidate draws crowds comparable in size to those of a popular sitting president.

"I feel as if we have finally gotten the American people and the press simultaneously focused on the real issues," he says. "Things I've been talking about for two years. George Bush has made catastrophic mistakes in Iraq, catastrophic mistakes in foreign policy. He's shown bad judgment, made bad choices about how to proceed in a war on terror. I think he's also out of touch with the American people on what their day-to-day lives are like. The cost of health care skyrockets; he has no plan to reduce it. School is expensive; he's made it worse. He has a string of broken promises about not hurting Social Security as he dips into it every day. This is the most say-one-thing-and-do-another administration in history."

Dressed in a gray suit, with a blue shirt and blue tie, Kerry sits in a classroom in the law school building near the quad where the rally was held. He's been fighting off a cold that has caused him to lose his voice, but earlier he was especially spirited as he launched the latest blistering attack on Bush: that he's living in a fantasy world.

"It's the truth of what I think is happening," Kerry says. "When you sit there and say your CIA is guessing , when you talk about the right-way/wrong-way polls being better in Iraq than in America, when you ignore what the Iraqi prime minister visiting you says about thousands of terrorists crossing the border and say there are only a handful -- you're living in a world of spin. You're in fantasyland." He pauses. "When you don't understand what's happening to the American family and talk about tax cuts they've received, when you celebrate jobs going overseas, when you talk about job numbers that are less than what your own targets were -- you're not telling the truth to the American people."

[henslee]

1. That is the biggest clearest, wonderfulest photo I have ever seen!

[LittleClarkie]

2. My favorite is still the one from Madison

I have it as my wallpaper.