ABC News' The Note: First Source for Political News
W A S H I N G T O N, Aug. 5, 2004—<br> -- NOTED NOW
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25 days until the Republican convention89 days until election day
NEWS SUMMARYEvery Aug. 5, for the last 17 years, The Note has handed out its annual "Best in Politics Awards."
So, without further ado, here are the 2004 Awards:
Best Mark McKinnon quote: "We think it's unfortunate these particular fine musicians have decided to affiliate with a hate-filled fringe group like MoveOn.''
Best capacity to stay on message: Steve Schmidt of the Bush campaign.
Best ability to hide seething anger: George W. Bush and John Kerry (tie).
Best ability to make a party salivate before winning a statewide race: Barack Obama.
Best ability to withstand political ads every 0.25 nanoseconds: the voters of Ohio and Pennsylvania (tie).
Best political reporter you (probably) aren't paying enough attention to: Jeff Zeleny of the Chicago Tribune.
Best case of not instantly referring another reporter to the PR department: Carl Cameron of Fox News Channel.
Best attempt to deflect annoyance away from a colleague: Cara Morris of the DSCC.
Best Bush advance person: Greg Jenkins.
Best Kerry advance person: Greg Hale.
Best capacity to collegially share a beat: Pat Healy and Glen Johnson of the Boston Globe .
Best examples of entertainers supporting BC04 that Mark McKinnon could come up with: Lee Ann Womack, Kid Rock, and Jessica Simpson.
Best list of states that will determine who wins the White House: Pennsylvania, Florida, Wisconsin, and Ohio.
Best unwritten newspaper story: "Barack Obama's Very Liberal Voting Record."
Best congenial quotemeister of the cycle: Jano Cabrera of the DNC.
Best job staying off of TV: Karl Rove.
Best political reporter of the cycle: the one who first writes the definitive early voting story.
Best bet to piss off the Service: Vince Morris of the New York Post .
Best back-to-school gift for the young children of those busy with the 2004 campaign: the fantastic new Disney Dream Desk PC. Link
Best ratio of quality stories to number of stories: Davie Maraniss and Blaine Harden (tie).
Best August headline on a Jennifer Steinhauer story: "Foreigners Shun New York, Keeping Hotel Rates Down."
Best headquarters security: Bush-Cheney '04.
Best professional synergy: David Lightman and Joe Lieberman.
Best leveraging of a Bush Cabinet job towards future White House ambitions: n/a.
Best bad job of vetting of the cycle: whoever hired Dr Brenda Bartella Peterson, the DNCS' first-ever director of religious outreach, and one of the co-signers of an amicus brief filed to support Michael Newdow's plea to get "under God" removed from the pledge. (Note news: She resigned yesterday.)
Best on-message regional press shop: BC04, bar none.
Best job keeping his background quotes anonymous: Richard Armitage.
Best high-volume prolific ACT spammer: Minnesota's Meighan Stone.
Best luck of the Bush Administration: Henry Kissinger stepping down as head of the 9/11 commission.
Best manipulation of the adolescent sensibilities of some of America's leading political reporters: the deployment of Bruce Springsteen.
Best ability to hide quality Jonathan Weisman and Jeff Birnbaum stories from public view: the Washington Post business section.
Best badge of honor achieved in a Bob Novak column: Ginny Wolfe, who is today branded "supremely uncommunicative to this column"!!!
President Bush signs the Department of Defense Appropriations Act for Fiscal Year 2005 at the White House at 9:55 am ET, participates in an "Ask President Bush" event at the Aladdin Shrine Center in Columbus, Ohio at 1:00 pm ET, and speaks at a rally at the Wendler Arena in Saginaw, Mich., at 6:00 pm ET.
In Ohio, aides say the president will again voice support for letting workers who log more than 40 hours in a week take time off later. Unions say that's an opening for employers to avoid paying premium overtime in cash.
The Labor Department reports that new jobless claimed dropped to 336,000 for the week ending July 31 — the lowest since the beginning of July and a little better than expected, AP Notes. The number of workers who still get unemployment checks dropped 35,000 to 2.91 million for the week ending July 24. Job growth numbers, however, are still trudging along slowly, analysts say.Today at 10:30 am ET, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton joins former President of the National Partnership for Women and Families Judith Lichtman for a conference call to talk about President Bush's new flex time proposal. Expect to hear the sentence "The current Bush proposal is a warmed-over version of a proposal that the conservative House leadership could not even bring up for a vote this year because of opposition from moderate House Republicans" more than once.
Senator Kerry speaks at the UNITY 2004 Journalists of Color Conference in Washington, D.C. at 9:00 am ET. He then flies to St. Louis, Senator Edwards joins him for a 1:30 pm ET rally at Union Station. The two Senators attend a second rally at the Missouri State Capitol in Jefferson at 6:25 pm ET.
The Kerry-Edwards campaign reunites Kerry coming from the North and Edwards from the South to get on the train in St. Louis. Their message of the day: the troops, terrorism, and restructuring the military.
The outline: expanding active-duty forces, doubling the size of the Special Forces, invest in technology, integrate the National Guard into homeland security plans, and work with military families and veterans.
Then the duo do their own version of the Whistle-Stop Express and head along the tracks for an 1,800-mile trip with stops in Missouri, Colorado, and New Mexico, before ending up in Arizona.
Senator Edwards remains on the tour until Aug. 8.
And when that train comes, we'll get on board . . .
ABC News Vote 2004: Bush-Cheney v. Kerry-Edwards:Today, it's Meet Me in St. Louis.
The good people of the St. Louis-Post Dispatch report that Senator John Kerry and his running mate, Senator John Edwards, will be in St. Louis today after traveling through opposite ends of the state. Kerry campaigned in No Mo late Wednesday, with a rally in Hannibal. Edwards heads up from a night in Cape Girardeau — or to locals, "Cape." The two headline a rally in Union Station before traveling by train to the state's capital, Jefferson City — or to locals, "Jeff." LINK
Yesterday, it was Rumble in Davenport.
The New York Times ' David Halbfinger and Elisabeth Bumiller wrap the dueling campaign events of President Bush and Senator Kerry, which "gave humid Davenport the feel of a crisp day in late October." LINK
We love this paragraph:
"Just who was shadowing whom was not quite clear, though each campaign accused the other of following it around the country. The mayor of Davenport, Charlie Brooke, a Republican, said city officials heard from the Bush campaign early last week that the president would be dropping by, and only later from the Kerry campaign. But Stephanie Cutter, Mr. Kerry's spokeswoman, said that the Kerry advance team was in town on July 19 to book the site for the forum and that 'we have hotel invoices to prove it.'"
The Washington Post 's Dan Balz and Amy Goldstein wrap the Close Encounter in Davenport on Wednesday, Noting the "dueling campaign events within blocks of each other where they painted sharply contrasting portraits of the economy and U.S. policy in Iraq" and the "Ocean's Davenport" bank robberies. LINK
The Washington Post 's Ann Gerhart Notes, few people in "this homogeneous slice of the heartland," i.e., Davenport, found it unusual when Kerry and Bush campaigned within blocks of one another; "these are Iowans, after all, smug and secure in their disproportionate political power." LINK
In their write-up of the showdown in Davenport yesterday, the Chicago Tribune's Zeleny and Zuckman write "In the end, after two hours of speechifying, the political landscape in Davenport may not have shifted, but the back-to-back events offered a window into the final 90 days of the campaign as both candidates concentrate on shoring up their supporters and fighting for a small set of undecided voters in highly targeted regions of the country." LINK
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