By:Jerry Burke
Oh, wait, sorry; you have to campaign! Maybe next year, Dubya!
So just how does a stressed prez get the American public's split-second attention span back on his game plan? Well, he could've done worse than sending Secretary of Homeland Security Tom Ridge out on stage to warn the public of impending doom.
Actually, no, he couldn't do any worse then that.
So in came Ridge, not two days after Kerry tapped John Edwards as the Democratic candidate for vice president, with major news. Well, OK, it was old news. It seems terrorists are planning to disrupt Election Day, just like what happened in Spain. Granted, the administration said the very same thing when that happened, but now they had new information, right?
Sadly, no. No times. No dates. Nothing for the American people to be on the lookout for. No methods. No location. Just something. Not something, say, big enough to raise our handy-dandy color alert chart up to orange. But something. Trust us.
And you thought Kerry was a pessimist.
Luckily, I am a pessimist. I always see the worst in people, and not just because I'm staring through their bedroom windows at 5:30 a.m. I won't go as far as to say this useless announcement was a political distraction to take away from the feel-good vibes of a Kerry-Edwards push toward the White House. But the timing was creepy, and if it was a ploy to remind people that Bush is serious about terrorism, it failed miserably. Even the New York Post carried the story on page 28.
And why did it fail? I'm starting to get the feeling that as Iraq gets worse and Saddam refines his new G.Q. look throughout his trial, people may start remembering that the man responsible for the Sept. 11 attacks isn't anywhere near Iraq.
Now comes the fun part. Ridge is currently looking into what steps may be taken, in case of an emergency, to postpone the election in the event of a terrorist attack.
Folks, short of the second coming of Christ or an alien landing on the White House lawn, there should be no, repeat, no way for anyone to even think about calling off the election. If, God forbid, anything happens that day, or in the days before it, a suspension of our most fundamental right as citizens would be the ultimate insult to everything this country stands for.
It's ludicrous to even guess what effect such a hypothetical situation would have on the outcome, but I'll do it anyway. Would people get scared and press on with the incumbent, or would they see another attack on our soil as sign of incompetence in an administration claiming to be so tough on terrorists? That's for the people to decide, with or without the vague divining of Mr. Ridge.
