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Wednesday, September 22, 2004
Kerry visits Orlando, blasts Bush on war
By ANDREW LYONS | News-Journal Staff Writer
ORLANDO — Sen. John Kerry made a late-night stop here to blast the president’s wartime judgment just hours after George W. Bush urged the world community to support the new Iraqi government.
“Every time the president has exercised judgment in Iraq, he has turned his back on the best advice of generals, the best advice of the CIA, the best advice of foreign leaders,” Kerry told a crowd of about 11,000 people at the T.D. Waterhouse Centre. “America is paying the price and America’s soldiers are paying the price.”
Kerry, the Democratic presidential nominee, arrived more than an hour late with vice presidential running mate John Edwards. He spoke with a gravelly voice and a sore throat, but promised to “carry a big stick.
“We need a president who tells America the truth,” Kerry said. “The president should be holding a summit this week . . . laying the groundwork, saying we all have a stake in the outcome in the war of Iraq.
“We need a president who knows how to lead America and the world and make us safer.”
Roughly three hours after Bush defended his Iraq invasion decision to the United Nations, Kerry told reporters earlier in the day in Jacksonville: “The president needs to live in the world of reality.”
For the first time since three hurricanes hammered the state, Kerry and Edwards converged on Florida this week to discuss expanding health-care coverage and how residents can buy cheaper prescription drugs from Canada.
In Orlando, Kerry applauded residents for rebuilding in the wake of the deadly storms.
“We have watched you, everyone has felt for you,” he said.
“Florida has shown America how to fight.”
Before Kerry’s arrival, about 20 Bush supporters held signs and umbrellas in the rain to show support for the president.
Eighteen-year-old Lauren Mayeux said the race for the White House isn’t as close as polls might suggest. She predicted a landslide for Bush come November.
“He’s only concentrating on what Bush hasn’t done,” she said.
And what Bush has done, 76-year-old Gloria Laird said, is cripple terrorist cells across the world.
“I’m not worried about all these benefits the government can do,” the Orlando woman said. “What good will it be if we’re all annihilated?”
Inside, 17-year-old Parisa Rassoul, a senior at Melbourne High School, acknowledged she was too young to vote but said she’s watching history unfold.
“We’re all here for different reasons, but one main cause, to change the person in the White House,” she said. “It’s really a good feeling being around these people.”
As Edwards campaigned in Tampa earlier Tuesday, Kerry pledged at a rally in Jacksonville that in this election, “every vote will count and be counted.”
Many Florida Democrats have claimed since Bush’s 537-vote win in Florida that decided the 2000 presidential race that the president stole the election when voting recounts were halted by a divided Supreme Court.
Among the disputed ballots were 27,000 in Duval County — most of them in four city precincts which were predominantly black and Democrat. A poorly worded punch-card ballot instructed voters to vote for a candidate on each page. However, the presidential candidates were on two pages. Voters who followed the instructions had their ballot tossed out for “over voting.”
U.S. Rep. Corrine Brown, first elected to Congress in 1992, said she believes blacks will support Kerry in droves and she exhorted those attending the rally to ask Kerry “to take off the gloves” in his campaign against the president.
“The African-American community is going to be behind Kerry. The African-American community knows what is at stake in this election,” Brown said.
“So many of the policies of the Bush administration, we feel it directly, including Medicare, the war in Iraq and cuts in housing,” said Brown, seeking her seventh term in Congress. “When America has a cold, the African-American community has pneumonia.”
Kerry is expected to hold a town hall meeting today in West Palm Beach to address health-care costs for seniors while Edwards plans to campaign in Miami.
While polls have shown the candidates neck-and-neck or the president slightly ahead, Central Florida has proved a political hot potato that refuses to cool.
Kerry has already stumped at Orlando’s Plaza Theatre and the Kennedy Space Center while Bush attended the Daytona 500 and kicked off his re-election campaign at the Orange County Convention Center.
The area is expected to host additional rallies, perhaps the loudest coming in two and a half weeks when rockers REM and Bruce Springsteen rally behind Kerry and take the T.D. Waterhouse stage on their second to the last stop of the “Vote-for-a-Change” tour.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.