Bush back to campaigning in battleground states
Devenish: 'Strategically, it is an important month for us'
From Dana Bash
CNN Washington Bureau
Friday, July 30, 2004 Posted: 1:42 PM EDT (1742 GMT)
(CNN) -- After keeping a low profile during the Democratic National Convention, President Bush returns to the campaign trail Friday morning to unveil broad themes of his agenda for the next four years at stops in three crucial battleground states.
Friday's events kick off a monthlong push by the Bush campaign leading up to the Republican National Convention in New York.
Nicolle Devenish, the Bush campaign's communications director, said the president will deliver a retooled stump speech during stops in Missouri, Michigan and Ohio that will pivot away from tough rhetoric against Democratic nominee Sen. John Kerry and focus more on "laying out a vision" for the next four years.
"Strategically, it is an important month for us," said Devenish, who said this has been a long-planned strategy.
"We started the campaign by talking about what the country has been through, the war on terror and the economy, and now we'll talk about the vision for the next four years and the difference in visions for the future."
Bush's new refrain during this time will be "we've turned a corner, and we're not turning back," Devenish said.
During the Democratic convention, Bush remained out of the public eye on a working vacation at his Texas ranch, and his campaign stopped advertising.
But that hiatus will come to a quick end Friday, just hours after Kerry formally accepted his party's nomination. (Kerry: 'most important election of our lifetime')
The president will be traveling intensively in August, and aides said it will look more like a traditional campaign, with impromptu stops and visits along the way.
The Bush campaign has dubbed this next phase of the campaign as the "Heart and Soul Tour: Moving America Forward," a slogan that will be displayed on his campaign bus and will be accompanied by new ads mirroring the theme that will also start Friday.
The Bush campaign plans to split the four-week phase into three parts:
The first two weeks will focus on "strengthening families and the changing economy," with a special emphasis on promoting what the president calls the "ownership society."
Bush will promote ideas such as mandatory flex time for Americans who want it and reintroduce a proposal for privatizing part of Social Security, which he pushed in his last campaign but pulled back on once the stock market plummeted.
He also will talk about issues such as home ownership, education and help for small businesses, which he already discusses on the stump.
The third week will be focused on national security, where the president will talk about the "need for success" in the war on terror, though he is not likely to unveil new policies.
In the last week going into the GOP convention, the president will talk about a different issue each day and discuss policy initiatives in detail.
Implicit in all this is the Bush campaign's desire to draw contrasts between his policies and those of Kerry, even if he doesn't explicitly make such comparisons in his stump speech.
Meanwhile, Kerry and his running mate, Sen. John Edwards, will embark Friday on a two-week, 21-state, coast-to-coast campaign journey.
Oh I get it, the last 4 years of your administration sucked much ass but NOW, oh NOW, things are going to change.
Wherever you go, there you are.
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Stravo wrote:Oh I get it, the last 4 years of your administration sucked much ass but NOW, oh NOW, things are going to change.
No, since he won't have to worry about re-election we'll turn the corner to more pointless bloodshed because because of the Administrations incompetence, more fundamentalist agenda crammed down our throats, and more subsidies to give tax money to global conglomerates, and oh yeah, fifty percent less intergrity. Yeah, we turned a corner all right. And ran down Uncle Sam and Lady Liberity as we careen blindly in the grips of a drunken stupor.
George W. Bush embodies everything wrong with the Republican Party today.
Any city gets what it admires, will pay for, and, ultimately, deserves…We want and deserve tin-can architecture in a tinhorn culture. And we will probably be judged not by the monuments we build but by those we have destroyed.--Ada Louise Huxtable, "Farewell to Penn Station", New York Times editorial, 30 October 1963 X-Ray Blues
The third week will be focused on national security, where the president will talk about the "need for success" in the war on terror, though he is not likely to unveil new policies.
I'm glad he's going out on a limb here. Here I was, thinking that Kerry's a total pussy and would put Osama in the Supreme Court.
Better than throwing up tax walls around failing American manufactuers so that some other President can suffer after countless millions go down the drain in failed austerity hand-outs.
The more I hear about John Kerry's platform, the more there is to dislike - especially when it comes to his vision of this country's economic future.
This reminds me of a humorous impersonation of former prime minister Brian Mulroney done by Don Ferguson. I'll paraphrase what he said, "We've turned a corner with health care reforms, we've turned a corner with economic reforms, we've turned a corner with free trade, we've turned a corner with helping the poor....... (counts on his fingers on how many corners turned) Shit! We're back where we started."
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Axis Kast wrote:Better than throwing up tax walls around failing American manufactuers so that some other President can suffer after countless millions go down the drain in failed austerity hand-outs.
The more I hear about John Kerry's platform, the more there is to dislike - especially when it comes to his vision of this country's economic future.
We're not competitive in industry and manufactures, and this isn't going to change no matter how much protectionism you throw up. Its certainly not going to help, and we simply cannot compete in some of these markets with the developing third world.
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We're not competitive in industry and manufactures, and this isn't going to change no matter how much protectionism you throw up. Its certainly not going to help, and we simply cannot compete in some of these markets with the developing third world.
I heard one proposal for a law that would require all goods imported into the United States to be made according to standards comparable to regulations on US-made goods, or tax the hell out of things that don't. The rationale was that it would make it equally expensive to outsource manufactoring as to make goods in the US, and thus eliminate the incentive for US companies to outsource. The author (this was some blog somewhere) said that, coupled with tax breaks, this would cause manufactoring to come surging back to the United States.
That particular proposal strikes me as a tad...impractical.
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just nuke everyone else and that'd end all out sourcing....
Damn it, what is with all the out sourcing hatred? If one want a free market, one should play the rules following one. If one want to be socialist, than at least be honest about it....
Question : Does anyone else think that the U-bend might well be the corner he's talking about?
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