On July 9th the Frederick News-Post featured a letter
to the editor, titled “Facts, not garbage,” by Mindy
Adcock, who describes herself as, “a young voter who is
searching for the best president to help [her] with
[her] future...”
Apparently she decided to go online and look up John
Kerry’s website to see what his opinions and plans are.
This is good – I always like seeing people take the
initiative to become informed.
Unfortunately, her visit did not go so well. She says,
“I must say I was disappointed in Sen. John Kerry’s Web
site. The only thing I really found there was political
trashing of George Bush. I really did not find much
information as to what his opinions were except for the
fact that he does not agree with Mr. Bush.”
She continues, “I want to know the facts not the
garbage. Does Sen. Kerry want to share his opinions or
just complain?”
Her statements struck me as odd because it just so
happens that I was visiting John Kerry’s site just
yesterday. I didn’t remember it being all that negative.
But one can rarely trust one’s memory, so I went and
took another look a few minutes ago.
Not once, on the entire front page of Sen. Kerry’s
campaign site,
www.JohnKerry.com, does
Mr. Kerry attack George W. Bush or any member of his
administration.
In fact, the word “Bush” does not even appear on the
entire page.
Then I went over to Bush’s campaign site,
www.GeorgeBush.com. It
was quite a different scene. There are no less than six
attacks on John Kerry on Bush’s front page!
As far as covering the issues, I would have to say that
Bush and Kerry both explain their stances. For example,
John Kerry presents his 3-part plan for Iraq in the
issues section of his site, under the heading, “Winning
the Peace in Iraq.” George Bush presented his 5-part
plan for Iraq in a speech several months ago (But does
not have any clearly designated portion of his site for
Iraq – just “homeland security” and “national
security”).
In fact, I would say that as far as clearly presenting
opinion, Kerry’s site has done a much better job. Not
only are his opinions stated clearer, but he also has
more of them. Bush’s site only presents 9 topics. One of
those is “compassion,” so I won’t even bother counting
that. Two others sound virtually the same: “Homeland
Security” and “National Security.”
John Kerry’s site covers a whopping 28 issues.
“Compassion” has not been included, probably because it
is not really a political issue, and “National Security”
has been covered within “Homeland Security.”
So as far as I can tell, John Kerry indeed does want to
give his opinions, and does a surprisingly thorough job
doing so. Meanwhile, Bush’s site oversimplifies the
issues into broad topics, refuses to go into specifics,
and simply does not address many of the things covered
by Kerry.
Everyone who knows me knows that I favor Kerry as a
presidential candidate. Now I can add that I find his
website far superior to Bush’s.
As for Mindy Adcock, I have to wonder if she may have
accidentally gone to the website for the Democratic
National Committee. Her assessment of Senator Kerry’s
website simply does not fit reality.
For thise interested in donating to the Kerry
campaign, I set up
ePatriots Donation Page
- ePatriots is a grassroots fundraising effort being run
by the Democratic National Committee through their
website, democrats.org. Money that is raised is going
to help the Kerry/Edwards campaign. Basically, they let
you set up a simple webpage on which visitors can make
donations. The raised money is recorded for each page
creator - in this case me - Scott- and so on.
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other articles by Scott Zuke