{"id":1250,"date":"2004-02-25T15:29:07","date_gmt":"2004-02-25T22:29:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/?p=1250"},"modified":"2004-02-25T15:29:07","modified_gmt":"2004-02-25T22:29:07","slug":"round-one-is-over","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/2004\/02\/25\/round-one-is-over\/","title":{"rendered":"Round One is Over"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a name=\"001945\"><\/a>I&#8217;m thinking of the presidential election in terms of a boxing match.  Round One began roughly when the Democratic probable emerged in the wake of the New Hampshire primary.  Ladies and Gentlemen:  John Kerry.  I&#8217;ll arbitrarily end Round One right now.<\/p>\n<p>So, where are we?  Bush&#8217;s strategy had, by insider&#8217;s accounts echoed through the chattering classes and actually manifesting itself in comments made in his Meet the Press appearance, been to &#8220;stay above the fray&#8221; as LONG AS POSSIBLE (note the early September Republican Convention date, which also correspond to winding himself up with the military) &#8212; with his minions doing the dirty work &#8212; and generally work on a soft-focus campaign that worked well for Reagan (&#8220;It&#8217;s Morning in America, dontcha know?&#8221;) and Bill Clinton (Triangulate = Be an Amorphous Blob), and to wind himself as tightly to the military as possible (as well, for that matter, to NASCAR.)<\/p>\n<p>Where are we now?  Yesterday, Bush ran right into the muck of campaigning and slammed John Kerry as a flip-flopper before the Republican Governors Committee.  And he endorsed a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage, which even Tom DeLay voiced hesitation on.<\/p>\n<p>Granted, he still has his NASCAR appearance, but with regards to the other parts of his strategy&#8230; well, the plan has evidentally rather dramatically changed.<\/p>\n<p>Round One goes to Kerry.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;m thinking of the presidential election in terms of a boxing match. Round One began roughly when the Democratic probable emerged in the wake of the New Hampshire primary. Ladies and Gentlemen: John Kerry. I&#8217;ll arbitrarily end Round One right now. So, where are we? Bush&#8217;s strategy had, by insider&#8217;s accounts echoed through the chattering [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1250","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1250","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1250"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1250\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1250"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1250"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1250"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}