The Kerry & Bush Campaign Websites

On July 9th the Frederick News-Post featured a letter to the editor, titled “Facts, not garbage,” by Mindy Adcock, who describes herself as, “a young voter who is searching for the best president to help [her] with [her] future...”

Apparently she decided to go online and look up John Kerry’s website to see what his opinions and plans are. This is good – I always like seeing people take the initiative to become informed.

Unfortunately, her visit did not go so well. She says, “I must say I was disappointed in Sen. John Kerry’s Web site. The only thing I really found there was political trashing of George Bush. I really did not find much information as to what his opinions were except for the fact that he does not agree with Mr. Bush.”

She continues, “I want to know the facts not the garbage. Does Sen. Kerry want to share his opinions or just complain?”

Her statements struck me as odd because it just so happens that I was visiting John Kerry’s site just yesterday. I didn’t remember it being all that negative. But one can rarely trust one’s memory, so I went and took another look a few minutes ago.

Not once, on the entire front page of Sen. Kerry’s campaign site, www.JohnKerry.com, does Mr. Kerry attack George W. Bush or any member of his administration.

In fact, the word “Bush” does not even appear on the entire page.

Then I went over to Bush’s campaign site, www.GeorgeBush.com. It was quite a different scene. There are no less than six attacks on John Kerry on Bush’s front page!

As far as covering the issues, I would have to say that Bush and Kerry both explain their stances. For example, John Kerry presents his 3-part plan for Iraq in the issues section of his site, under the heading, “Winning the Peace in Iraq.” George Bush presented his 5-part plan for Iraq in a speech several months ago (But does not have any clearly designated portion of his site for Iraq – just “homeland security” and “national security”).

In fact, I would say that as far as clearly presenting opinion, Kerry’s site has done a much better job. Not only are his opinions stated clearer, but he also has more of them. Bush’s site only presents 9 topics. One of those is “compassion,” so I won’t even bother counting that. Two others sound virtually the same: “Homeland Security” and “National Security.”

John Kerry’s site covers a whopping 28 issues. “Compassion” has not been included, probably because it is not really a political issue, and “National Security” has been covered within “Homeland Security.”

So as far as I can tell, John Kerry indeed does want to give his opinions, and does a surprisingly thorough job doing so. Meanwhile, Bush’s site oversimplifies the issues into broad topics, refuses to go into specifics, and simply does not address many of the things covered by Kerry.

Everyone who knows me knows that I favor Kerry as a presidential candidate. Now I can add that I find his website far superior to Bush’s.

As for Mindy Adcock, I have to wonder if she may have accidentally gone to the website for the Democratic National Committee. Her assessment of Senator Kerry’s website simply does not fit reality.

For thise interested in donating to the Kerry campaign, I set up ePatriots Donation Page - ePatriots is a grassroots fundraising effort being run by the Democratic National Committee through their website, democrats.org.  Money that is raised is going to help the Kerry/Edwards campaign.  Basically, they let you set up a simple webpage on which visitors can make donations.  The raised money is recorded for each page creator - in this case me - Scott- and so on.