CALIFORNIA YANKEE

Sharpton Was Paid To Campaign for Kerry

The Associated Press reports that Al Sharpton was paid $86,715 by the Democratic National Committee to campaign for Kerry and other Democratic candidates.

In an interview with The Associated Press, Sharpton admitted he was paid for travel:

"They asked me to travel to 20 or 30 cities to campaign, and I did that," Sharpton said. "What am I supposed to do, donate the cost of air fare?"

As usual the Reverend Al wasn't being totally forthcoming. According to the Associated Press, Sharpton was paid for more than travel:

But records show that while most of the money was to reimburse travel expenses, Sharpton was paid $35,000 as a "political consulting fee" 15 days after the election.

So when Sharpton was at Kerry's side when Kerry was trying to connect with black voters it wasn't necessarily because Sharpton thought Kerry was the best candidate, it was because Sharpton was paid a "consulting" fee.

None of the other eight Democrats who were once in the race were paid travel reimbursements or consulting fees.

UPDATE: At Catain's Quarters, Captain Ed posts that payments to Sharpton amount to a shakedown by Sharpton or a payoff by Kerry.

At Outside The Beltway, James Joyner posts that a $35,000 "consulting fee is rather odd considering that the Kerry campaign isn't paying some of the people who were actually its employees.

Dead Voters Still Eligible To Vote

The Chicago Tribune reports that its analysis of voter records more than 181,000 dead people were listed on the rolls in six states - Florida, Iowa, Ohio, Michigan and Minnesota, and New Mexico.

Florida led the way with 64,889 registered voters who were also listed in a database of Social Security Administration death claims.

Michigan came in second with 50,051 dead voters registered.

5,000 dead people remained on the rolls on Election Day in New Mexico, which is especially bothersome in light of the fact that the presidential election in New Mexico was decided by 6,000 votes.

In Iowa 4,900 who died remained on the rolls.

This is not an easy problem to solve. In New Mexico election officials are required to purge the names of deceased voters. Health officials each month supply a list of recently deceased residents that the Secretary of State Rebecca uses to purge the voter rolls. But voters move and die in other jurisdictions and may never be a New Mexico death certificate.

This isn't that big of a deal. I haven't seen reports that the dead voted in the 2004 election. It just looks bad.

Kerry Campaign Seeks To Join Ohio Recount Fight

The Washington Post reports that on Tuesday the Kerry presidential campaign asked an Ohio judge to allow it to join the legal fight over whether one county can decline to participate in the state’s impending recount:

A pair of third-party presidential candidates, who said that reports of problems at the polls on Election Day are not being addressed, are forcing the Buckeye State to recount its entire presidential vote. But David A. Yost, a lawyer for Delaware County, just outside Columbus, won a temporary restraining order last week blocking any recount there. He told the Columbus Dispatch that a second count would be a poor use of county resources. President Bush won the mostly Republican area handily, unofficial results show.

Lawyers for the Kerry campaign asked to join Green Party presidential candidate David Cobb, Libertarian candidate Michael Badnarik and the National Voting Rights Institute in the fight to force the county to participate in the recount. "If there's going to be a recount in Ohio, we don't want it to exclude Delaware County or any other county that might decide to follow Delaware County's lead," Kerry lawyer Dan Hoffheimer said. "It should be a full, fair and accurate recount."

The Cincinnati Enquirer reports that President Bush won traditionally Republican Southwest Ohio by more votes than was apparent November 2:

Final tallies show that Bush defeated Democrat Sen. John Kerry, 463,251 to 307,661, in Butler, Clermont, Hamilton and Warren counties. On Election Night, unofficial results had Bush defeating Kerry, 450,591 to 295,858.

The final 155,590-vote margin contributed to Bush's decisive win in Ohio. Unofficial results showed Bush defeated Kerry by 136,483 votes in Ohio.

According to MSNBC’s David Shuster this is the first time the Kerry campaign has joined the legal wrangling in Ohio in any formal fashion. Democrats not affiliated with the Kerry campaign speculate that this move is intended to appease party activists who might be angry that Kerry wasn’t more active in this recount to begin with.

None of this is going to change the result.

UPDATE: The Associated Press reports that Ohio counties finished certifying votes in the presidential race Wednesday:

Ohio's 88 counties reported validating 121,598 provisional ballots from 156,977 checked, according to an Associated Press tabulation. The deadline for counties to certify election results was Wednesday.

[. . .]

President Bush's margin of victory against John Kerry on Nov. 2 was 136,483 votes. Kerry conceded after figuring he would not get enough of the provisional ballot vote to overtake Bush's total.

Carlo LoParo, a spokesman for Blackwell's office, said there will be no available breakdown of how many provisionals went to Bush or Kerry. He said the final tally will be inclusive of all votes.

Even if all of the 121,598 provisional ballots validated went to Kerry, it wouldn't change the result.

Friends of John Kerry

The Boston Globe reports that John Kerry plans to set up a federal campaign committee, Friends of John Kerry, which would allow him to seek a fifth term in the US Senate in 2008 while not precluding another run for president that year.

The Committee will be a vehicle for fund-raising for either campaign.

According to the Globe, Kerry transferred all the money from his previous committee to his presidential campaign committee after retaining his Senate seat in 2002 and Kerry could do the same should he decide against seeking reelection in favor of a second bid for the presidency.

Or Kerry could break new ground and run for both President and Senate. This would go beyond the precedent set by Lyndon Johnson in 1960, Lloyd Bentsen in 1988, and Joe Lieberman in 2000 who all ran for the vice presidency and the U.S. Senate simultaneously.

Is running for two offices at the same time just a Democratic thing?

Kerry Campaign Slammed On Hispanic Outreach

The Associated Press reports that Simon Rosenberg, founder and president of the centrist New Democrat Network says, "John Kerry did not compete adequately for Hispanic votes, period. If we don't reverse the gains that President Bush made, we can forget our hope of being a majority party again."

Rosenberg also complained that "the Kerry campaign and the DNC lacked a national strategy for Hispanics and did not spend enough money on advertising or enough time campaigning in Hispanic communities and did not employ enough people on the get-out-the-vote effort."

Exit polls indicated Bush won 44 percent of the Hispanic vote, up from 35 percent in 2000. Kerry won 53 percent, down from 62 percent four years ago for Democrat Al Gore.

I don't think Kerry took the Hispanic vote for granted. In July the Kerry campaign announced it would spend $1 million airing Spanish-language television ads in Florida, New Mexico, Nevada, Arizona, Colorado, Ohio, Oregon, Washington, Pennsylvania and North Carolina.

That ad campaign may have been too little, too late. At the end of April the New York Times reported about concern among minority leaders that Kerry hadn't reached out to the Hispanic community:

"The reality is that we're entering May and the Kerry campaign has no message out there to the Hispanic community nor has there been any inkling of any reach-out effort in any state to the Hispanic electorate, at least with any perceivable sustainable strategy in mind," Alvaro Cifuentes, the chairman of the Democratic National Committee's Hispanic Caucus, said in an e-mail message to party leaders provided by a recipient who insisted on anonymity. "It is no secret that the word of mouth in the Beltway and beyond is not that he does not get it, it is that he does not care."

Separately, in a letter addressed to Mr. Kerry, Raul Yzaguirre, the president of the National Council of La Raza, denounced the "remarkable and unacceptable absence of Latinos in your campaign."

"Relegating all of your minority staff to the important but limited role of outreach only reinforces perceptions that your campaign views Hispanics as a voting constituency to be mobilized, but not as experts to be consulted in shaping policy," wrote Mr. Yzaguirre, whose group is among the oldest, largest and most influential representing Hispanics.

Maybe Kerry should have selected New Mexico's Hispanic Governor Richardson to be his running mate.

Clinton Blames Gay Marriage For Kerry's Loss

Former President Clinton spoke at Hamilton College Tuesday night about why he thought his party lost last week's presidential election.

The Associated Press reports Clinton warned that Democrats "cannot be nationally competitive when we don't feel comfortable talking about our convictions:"

"I do not believe either party has a monopoly on morality or truth," Clinton told an audience of more than 4,500 at Hamilton College in upstate New York.

[. . .]

"I think the current divisions are partly the fault of the people in my party for not engaging the Christian evangelical community in a serious discussion of what it would take to promote a real culture of life," Clinton said.

More interesting is what the Associated Press did not report. According to the Utica Observer Dispatch Clinton put much of the blame for Kerry's loss on gay marriage:

"Gay marriage was an overwhelming factor in the defeat of John Kerry," Clinton told the audience at the Margaret Bundy Scott Field House.

[. . .]

"There was astonishing turnout among evangelical Christians who were voting on the basis of moral values," he said. "I do not believe either party has a monopoly on morality or truth."

Clinton said Democrats had a story to tell about abortion and gay marriage. They didn't tell it. Abortions declined during his terms in office, he said, because of policies encouraging adoption and rewarding mothers.

Democrats should have emphasized that gay marriage should be up to the states -- and that state sovereignty is a traditionally Republican value.

"Gay marriage was an overwhelming factor in the defeat of John Kerry," Clinton said. "With one decision of one Supreme Court, all of the sudden we have a constitutional amendment designed, I think, to whip people up, to inflame them, make them stop thinking about other issues."

In responding to questions submitted in advance, Clinton discussed why Americans are the target of international resentment:

Making war in Iraq without world approval, he said, was part of a larger pattern of withdrawal from international agreements such as the Kyoto Protocol and antiballistic treaty.

Clinton warned the nation is moving in a direction of ideological extremism, where people vote not on issues or evidence but party affiliation and the perception of candidates' morality.

"We have no call to go into the future divided based on who's a good or bad person," Clinton said. "The fundamental underlying realities sooner or later will compel us to abandon demeaning one another and start cooperating. Our common humanity in the end will always matter more."

Clinton has blamed Kerry's loss on gay marriage in both of the speeches he has given since President Bush's re-election.

In a speech Friday to the Urban Land Institute, Clinton said Kerry's campaign an Adverse impact from two crucial events beyond his control: the decision of the Massachusetts high court legalizing same-sex marriage, which proved more polarizing than the Democrats understood, and the release of the Osama bin Laden videotape days before the election.

While the reference to gay marriage was in the Boston Globe's version of the Associated Press' report of Clinton's speech to the Urban Land Institute, it was not included in the USA Today or the Tampa Bay Online Versions.

Why are some of the legacy media trying to hide the role gay marriage played in the presidential election? Is this similar to the press not reporting that New Jersey's governor McGreevy was gay until he announced he intended to resign last August.

Students Arrested Protesting President Bush's Re-election

About 250 Bard College students protested the presidential election results on Friday claiming George Bush was not the legitimate winner.

The protesters marched from campus to the center of the Hudson Valley village of Red Hook and blocked traffic at by staging a 45-minute sit-in:

"George Bush is not our president, and we reject him as our president," protester Gabe Rey-Goodlatt said. "He's a non-elected president who stole the election again in 2004."

Twelve students were charged with disorderly conduct after becoming confrontational with officers.

According to the Associated Press, as the students were marched back to the college a driver yelled at the students to:

Go start standing in Tiananmen Square.

The First Amendment is a wonderful thing. Let the healing begin.

It's Over

The Associated Press is reporting that Kerry has conceded the 2004 presidential race.

Break out the champagne.

Kerry just gained a lot of good will.

Kerry Wins Minnesota

MSNBC calls Minnesota for Kerry.

MSNBC's Electoral Tally as of 4:42:
Bush 269
Kerry 221

It's Not Over Yet

MSNBC projects that President Bush won Ohio and Florida, bringing MSNBC's Electoral Vote to tally to 269. Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Mexico, and Wisconsin are still to be called.

Kerry’s campaign is unwilling to concede, hoping that he would win Ohio’s 20 electoral votes when all the ballots were counted, which won't happen for almost two weeks. MSNBC sums it up:

“We’ve waited four years for this victory. We can wait one more night,” Sen. John Edwards of North Carolina, the Democratic vice presidential candidate, told cheering supporters in Boston.

The Bush Campaign responded:

Bush Communications Director Nicolle Devenish called the Kerry campaign’s stance “desperate,” saying Kerry would have to win an unrealistic number of votes to capture Ohio.

“There’s no mathematical path to victory for Kerry in Ohio,” she said. “There aren’t enough votes there to alter the outcome of the re-election of George W. Bush.”

Here we go again.