AMERICA/ CONOR O'CLERY:John Kerry's choice of running mate was so popular with the anti-Bush section of the entertainment world that he and John Edwards were given a seven-minute standing ovation by a celebrity audience at New York's Radio City Music Hall on Thursday evening.
More importantly for his campaign finances, every one of those minutes translated into something like a million bucks, as the event raised a record $7.5 million. A crowd of more than 5,000 forked out between $250 and $25,000 for tickets, including Chevy Chase, Paul Newman, Sarah Jessica Parker, Meryl Streep and Jon Bon Jovi.
For that they got to hear John Kerry play the guitar and sing Woody Guthrie's popular Vietnam-era ballad, This land is your land, this land is my land - vowing to win voters "from California to the New York Island". The stars also mined the lyrics of popular songs to fit the message. To roars of appreciation Bon Jovi reworked the chorus from George Harrison's Here Comes the Sun to sing: "It's been four years since it was clear."
Soul singer Mary J. Blige regretted that George Bush was President, with the chorus, "Things ain't what they used to be", from Marvin Gaye's Mercy, Mercy Me.
The event highlighted an underreported facet of American politics: some rich people actually want to be taxed more.
"Tax cuts for wealthy thugs like me are borderline criminal," said Paul Newman." Sex and the City star Parker said the country needed a president who would "look after all people and not just the privileged few". In a bout of Bush-bashing, actress Jessica Lange said she would do everything to get rid of the President "short of selling my children", and Chevy Chase listed presidential hobbies as: "Clinton plays the sax, John plays the guitar, and the President's a liar."
(The Bush campaign was not amused, and responded that the gala was "filled with enough hate and vitriol to make Michael Moore blush".)
Whoopi Goldberg made a sexual word play on Bush's name, adding that Team Kerry had asked to see her material beforehand but "I Xeroxed my behind and I folded it up in an envelope and I sent it back with a big kiss mark on."
The choice of the ever-beaming John Edwards clearly energised the partisan crowd in a way, as one fund-raiser noted, that the runner-up, Congressman Dick Gephardt, never could.
Edwards took the stage at the end of the evening and noted that Whoopi Goldberg had said she was afraid she wasn't going to get a phone call to be at the event. "I can relate to that," he said.
John Kerry's much-quoted quip that he and Edwards are superior to the Bush-Cheney team because "we've got better hair" has been challenged. A survey by Opinion Research Corporation for barber-shop suppliers Wahl Clipper, which rates people on a "grooming index", found that by a 50-30 ratio, Americans thought that the grey thatch of George W. Bush was more presidential than Kerry's Brillo-pad mane. Edwards's thick brown plumage does, however, contrast well with Dick Cheney's thinning white wisps. (Will the Kerry-Edwards campaign plane now be renamed "Hair Force One"?)
But Teresa Heinz Kerry is worried that it all may backfire. "You are going to lose the bald vote," she cautioned her husband when he once again came out with the hair line in Dayton, Ohio.
Usually it is the hairstyles and clothing of the aspiring First and Second Ladies that get more attention. John Edwards's wife, Elizabeth, has been the focus of some curiosity since she emerged on the national stage this week. Teresa Heinz Kerry introduced her as a "Mother Earth figure". She is indeed a mother but not in the "cookie-baking" sense that Hillary Clinton once portrayed. She was a successful lawyer until she gave up her practice in 1996 when their 16-year-old son, Wade, died. Then in her 40s, she had two more children, Emma Claire and Jack. "The music had gone out of our lives," she said once. "We needed to bring more children into the house." Calm and confident, she is Edwards's top adviser.
Edwards's media consultant, David Axelrod, commented that the fact that she is "a bit heavy" meant that she was seen as more of a real person.
The United States has a history of promoting democracy by sending monitors to observe elections in other countries. Now the international human rights group Global Exchange has invited 28 international observers to monitor the 2004 presidential election "to investigate irregularities, aid transparency, and bolster citizen confidence".
They may well be needed in Florida, home of the hanging chads, where thousands of voters, mainly African Americans, were disenfranchised four years ago when they were wrongly struck off the electoral lists after being misidentified as felons. There is already concern that Florida could once again be a fiasco. The Miami Herald has found that more than 2,100 Florida voters - many of them black Democrats - could be wrongly barred from voting in November.
Election officials included them on a list of 47,000 felons potentially ineligible to vote. Some barred voters were not aware that their rights had been restored. George Bush won the White House with a mere 537-vote majority at the time voting was stopped by the Supreme Court.
The single biggest contributor to George Bush's 2000 campaign, Kenneth Lay, was made to do the "perp walk" this week, led in handcuffs before television cameras on charges relating to the collapse of his energy company, Enron.
The White House hastened to put some distance between the President and "Kenny Boy". White House press secretary Scott McClellan pointed out that in the past Lay "supported Democrats and Republicans".
From 1989 to 2001 Lay and his wife, Linda, did indeed contribute to both parties, but of a $882,580 total, almost $800,000 went to Republicans.
How could the New York Post get it so wrong, reporting exclusively that Gephardt had been chosen by Kerry on the very day Edwards was named? The source for the "scoop" was none other than the tabloid's proprietor, Rupert Murdoch, according to a Post "employee" quoted in the New York Times.
This has been denied by a Murdoch spokesman but cynics point out that it would explain why there was no byline on the story, no source was quoted and no one was fired.