interesting collection of letters on response to a column josh marshall wrote predicting a kerry landslide. Josh wrote: "Iraq--and the myriad of assumptions, policies and repercussions it represents--is what this election is all about. I take it as a given that virtually no Gore voters from 2000 will pull the lever for Bush. But how many lightly-committed Bush voters from 2000 will hold him to account if they believe he gambled big and gambled unwisely with America's honor and safety, and came up short? I think more than a few. And since there were more Gore voters than Bush voters last time anyway, well..." Opinion Journal asked if there perhaps any gore voters who might switch to bush in 2004. some of their responses: http://www.opinionjournal.com/extra/?id=110005292 -- You quote Josh Marshall as saying: "I take it as a given that virtually no Gore voters from 2000 will pull the lever for Bush." What planet is he on? Since 9/11, I can't begin to tell you the number of my friends and family members who have said "I voted for Gore, but thank God George Bush is president!" The Angry Left feels that Iraq has been an unmitigated disaster, but there are plenty of Americans--including plenty of 2000 Gore voters--who feel otherwise. Besides, having watched news clips of recent Al Gore speeches, I suspect that more than a few Gore voters feel a shiver go down their spines when they think of how close the Tennessee Nut Case came to serving as our commander in chief. --William White Mr. Marshall is wrong in his assumption that "virtually no Gore voter will pull the lever for Bush." I voted for Gore, and I intend to vote for President Bush this time. It was our president's strong stand against terrorism that swayed my mind. I still dislike numerous positions of the Republican Party, including its near-constant attack on abortion on demand. But the issue of public safety overrides all others. I suspect Bush will garner quite a few people who normally vote Democratic. --Jean Notestein Your item on Josh Marshall, particularly his contention that Gore voters won't move to Bush this year, reminded me of this Reason.com thread of a few weeks ago. Tim Cavanaugh predicted a Bush lock, the very first commenter made a point similar to Mr. Marshall's, and more or less the rest of the thread was a few hundred posts of people claiming to have voted for Gore in 2000, and planning to vote for Bush this time around. I sort of count myself in that group; I am undecided but leaning toward Bush for now. You can take a thread of anonymous posters for whatever it's worth, but Democrats should be very, very careful about taking anything for granted. Turning it around, could anyone possibly have voted for Bush, witnessed Gore's subsequent meltdown and said, boy, I sure wish he were our president? I'm not sure what the case for Kerry (rather than against Bush) is, either. --"Ferncrombie" I wanted to e-mail the gent who claimed virtually no one who voted for Gore in 2000 will vote for Bush in '04; however, no e-mail address was available for him. Perhaps you might forward my message. I accompanied my parents as they campaigned for John F. Kennedy; my husband and I went door-to-door for George McGovern; I've lived in major urban centers my entire adult life, haven't had a TV since '75, lived abroad during much of the '80s, speak and write Japanese, have an advanced degree but no children, and produced and hosted a feminist radio show on an NPR affiliate in the '70s, and of course voted for Gore in 2000. All very nice and leftish. However, I believe George W. Bush is one of our greatest presidents and I will cast my vote for him in November. I can only speak for myself of course, but if a committed lefty like me can change her mind, all I can say is carry an oxygen tank, you might get buried in that landslide you're predicting. --Kelly Colgan Azar Here's one Gore voter who will vote for Bush. I've met a handful of others like me--self-identified conservatives who don't like Bush's cultural conservatism and felt Gore was the more traditionally conservative of the two. Now we believe that the left, as epitomized by Gore, has gone off the deep end and can't be trusted with the reins of power, especially during wartime. Actually, my vote for Bush won't be so much for Bush as against Michael Moore and his ilk. I still don't like Bush very much, but I don't trust Kerry to be tough on our enemies, and Moore and the rest of the left-wing nut cases shouldn't be rewarded for their lunacy. --Howard Owens The confidence of people like Josh Marshall is overextended. He assumes, from the anti-Bush energy on the left, that there is no center remaining to be swayed. Well, maybe he's right--the process of switching is already complete. I'm a Gore voter who's long since moved through the center to the right after 9/11. You'd think a blogger would have noticed a few others of us around the blogosphere. --Mike Gebert Mr. Marshall may be right that "virtually no Gore voters" will switch sides, but he can't say absolutely no Gore voters will switch, because I voted for Gore and I will most definitely pull the lever for Bush this November. (Although in my district, voting actually involves drawing a line to connect the head and tail of an arrow. It's got an arts-and-crafts feel to it.) Mr. Marshall makes the mistake of a partisan by assuming that everyone who voted for his candidate did so with the same hard-core, I-drank-the-Kool-Aid-licked-the-punchbowl-and-am-now-sucking-on-the-ice-cubes fervor that he did. I sure didn't. What I remember about the 2000 election was how unenthused most people were about either candidate (kind of like Kerry now). What I remember most about the aftermath of the election was Al Gore and his lawyers trying to disqualify the votes of military personnel stationed overseas because they were likely to be Republican. It's the only vote I cast of which I am now ashamed. Well, 2000 was so long ago. What does the Democratic Party offer today's voter? Oddly enough, Al Gore, newer, louder, scarier. In the past Gore has made numerous statements about the danger posed by Saddam; now he screeches, "They lied!" when the Bush administration points to the same intelligence reports that Gore used. Well, someone's lying. Then there's Howard Dean, also screeching (what is it with Democrats and volume control?), "I want my country back!" Do you know how annoying it is to have someone scream that at you? It's my country, too, you little--well, never mind. Teddy Kennedy stands on the floor of the U.S. Senate and announces that the torture chambers of Saddam have reopened under U.S. management. What a despicable statement, on so many levels. In the first place, it's a lie. What a handful of soldiers did at Abu Ghraib does not approach the horror that Saddam inflicted for 30 years, and Kennedy knows this. He knows it. Secondly, whether you agree with the war or not, we have thousands of Americans serving with courage, honor and distinction, and their accomplishments should not be diminished by the misdeeds of a handful of malcontents or by slander from a United States senator. But, if it gets some votes or hurts Bush, tearing down the morale of those risking their lives simply because we asked it of them seems like a small price to pay. Then there's John Kerry, who feels that terrorism is a law-enforcement issue. Excuse me, but isn't that the policy that got us 9/11? Wait until some Americans are murdered, arrest some low-level conspirators, and blow up a couple of camels? I'm voting for pre-emption. If you know where the bad guys are, get them before they can do bad things. I just now displayed my lack of nuance, and John Kerry is big on nuance, and nuance is in no way to be confused with flip-flopping, indecisiveness, trying to have it both ways or playing the ends against the middle. People who hack off other people's heads are not evil. They're misguided, confused, the product of a bad environment, or justifiably distressed by the Burger King being built where the falafel stand used to be. It could be a multicultural thing. Kerry's also big on the U.N. You know, the organization that opposed freedom for Iraqis while running a corrupt Oil for Food program that they are now covering up while making a hash of Kosovo and supplying peacekeepers who murder our peacekeepers and who demand sex for food from already brutalized refugees? Sure, let's turn things over to them. What else are the Democrats offering the would-be voter? Oh, yeah. Michael Moore, the controversial mockumentary filmmaker. After 9/11, Moore posted on his Web site that he couldn't understand why the terrorists killed people in largely Democratic states that went for Gore. Apparently, if 3,000 people had been murdered in largely Republican states, Moore would have been OK with that. Also, he seems to think that Osama bin Laden was upset that we don't have national health care or government-funded preschool. What Moore and the Democrats have in common is their contempt for the American people. When Moore isn't making money here with his mockumentaries, he's in Europe making money by telling the Europeans how stupid we Americans are because we don't have passports and when we meet people, we smile and say, "Hi, how ya doin'?" For their part, the Democrats have endorsed Moore's movie even though they know we didn't go into Afghanistan for a pipeline or Iraq for Halliburton, but if you can sell it to those stupid Americans, it might get some votes. There are many other issues behind my vote this November, but as things stand now, it's Democrats minus one, Bush plus one. That's a two-vote swing. --Laura Bangs__ I am a 52-year-old New Yorker who has never missed voting in a major election. I have never voted for a Republican and voted for Gore in 2000. I am an agnostic, but nonetheless, after 9/11, I thank God that Bush won. My wife has never voted for a Republican either. We live in the liberal state of New York, with roots in the liberal elite. I am a psychiatrist who read the New York Times every day until I canceled my subscription one year ago. The fact-checking and real reporting by parts of the blogosphere were instrumental in helping me make the break; the accretion of distortions that the liberal media consider "news" finally tipped me after Jayson Blair, but I was heading in that direction for several years in any event. I also have two voting-age children. My son recently enlisted in the U.S. Air Force, to the horror of innumerable (former) friends and associates, and my daughter is in a liberal arts college in New York. My son is a confirmed Bush supporter; my daughter wavers only because she finds the right of a woman to have an abortion (in our house we generally support a woman's right to choose, first trimester: definitely, second: probably, third: only in very exceptional circumstances) to be vital and worries about pro-lifers on the Supreme Court taking that right away. Despite that, she is leaning toward Bush because she thinks the War on Islamofascism, of which Iraq is only one front, is the crucial issue facing our country. Just thought you should know that two former Democratic voters, plus two voters who all precedents would suggest would be Democratic voters, are going to be voting for George W. in the fall. I might add that I find many people who tell me they agree with me on this, though they tend to whisper it since deviating from the liberal, mainstream-media party line is dangerous around here. I have actually heard from one patient, a psychologist herself, that her friends tell her they could never see a therapist who is a Republican. Personally, I am hoping for a landslide Republican victory, since I think it is the only thing that can save the Democratic Party from its lunatic fringe (just as the Goldwater debacle ultimately saved the Republican Party). When and if the Dems grow up and refind "reason," I will reconsider voting for them. --Perry Branson
