Kerry: He Came, He Saw, And It Sure As {****} Looks Like He Conquered

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JACKSON BAKER | 2/10/2004
http://www.memphisflyer.com/content.asp?ID=2830&onthefly=1

. . . when he was asked how important Memphis, and Tennessee, were to his campaign strategy, he answered simply, “I’m here!”

He sure was, and to the overflow crowd of some 1200 – mainly Democratic partisans, of all shapes and sizes – that had just heard Kerry, he did just fine. Took President Bush to task for gutting the economy and wrecking the nation’s good name in the world, excoriated "the most inept, reckless, arrogant, ideological foreign
policy in American history;" deplored the “Benedict Arnold CEOs” who take their HQs to Bermuda, thereby escaping their proper share of taxation; pledged to strengthen education; and promised to deliver on the late president Harry Truman’s dream of national health care. All that and much, much more -- even commenting on his own operation within the last year for prostate cancer, one that hat left him fully recovered, he said.

That Kerry talked at such length (a decided contrast to the rhetorical chip shots of Senator John Edwards of North Carolina and the verbal mortar rounds, carefully concentrated, of General Wesley Clark) was received as an enormous compliment by the Memphis audience, conscious that they were listening to an all-but-certain Democratic nominee and a very likely president. It was like getting their own State-of-the-Union address.

Afterward, though, many in the crowd – even some of those who were most impressed – wondered out loud if it was really necessary for Kerry to have talked so doggone long. The consensus was that he was maybe fifteen minutes over what would have been a good length – one reason for the overrun being that he had, in the free flow of his talking points, somehow missed bringing his peroration around to the his usual concluding challenge for President Bush: “...three words I know he’ll understand: “Bring it on!” Instead Kerry finished with a promise, once elected, to be able to say, a propos his own foreign and domestic goals, “Mission accomplished!” And the crowd, not to be denied, supplied the “Bring it on!” for him.

It was a night that local Democrats will long remember if Kerry goes on to be elected president.

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1. Kick

[Mass_Liberal]

2. anti-kick

just joshin ye.