Bill Clinton, once known on the campaign trail as Elvis for his superstar, crowd-pleasing charms, will rise from his sickbed next week to come to John Kerry's aid, six weeks after a quadruple bypass operation.
Clinton's last-ditch intervention, starting on Monday in Philadelphia in a joint appearance with Kerry, comes in the face of resistance from his wife. Senator Hillary Clinton is concerned that the former president could endanger his health so soon after the operation.
"Hillary has been fighting this all along, but we'll get a few appearances," said a senior Democratic official who was involved in the negotiations over Clinton's participation. "He really wants to do this. He watches every detail of the race. He knows more about it than I do."
The charisma of the 58-year-old former president has made him a figure of adulation among the Democratic faithful, but his participation may be a double-edged sword.
He also galvanizes Conservatives, who hold him in contempt for the Monica Lewinsky scandal. For that reason, Al Gore did not call on his help four years ago -- a decision much criticized by Democratic activists.
A Kerry spokesman, Joe Lockhart, said Clinton, who has been convalescing at his home in Chappaqua, New York, will make several solo campaign stops in the course of next week, after his joint appearance with Kerry. Clinton's office in Harlem Wednesday issued a short statement saying he was "pleased to be able to help John Kerry in this very important campaign for the future of our country."
Clinton has also agreed to tape a message to be sent out to voters' home telephones, and he may also record a radio advertisement.
At a Tuesday night campaign event, Kerry said he had spoken by telephone to Clinton, who had encouraged him, arguing that White House "scare tactics" would backfire.
The White House is countering Clinton's imminent return by taking the unusual step of sending the president's national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, out on the campaign trail.
It is an unprecedented step, since national security advisers do not normally take part in campaign politics, but the White House spokesman, Scott McClellan, yesterday defended the decision, saying Rice had been invited to speak at a number of venues and had agreed to attend.
Clinton's reappearance on the political scene comes at a time when Kerry is running neck-and-neck with the president in some polls and trailing in others.
A tracking poll by the Washington Post and ABC television put George Bush five percentage points ahead, but it offered a spark of hope to Kerry. He is winning by 54 percent to 43 percent among first-time voters, which suggests that a high turnout on Nov. 2 will be in his favor.
The two rivals pressed on with their high-mileage campaigning yesterday, sniping at each other as they criss-crossed the midwest in search of crucial swing votes.
"This president likes to say he's a leader," Kerry told a rally in Iowa. "Mr President, look behind you. There's no one there. It's not leadership if no one follows."
Bush hit back by saying that his challenger was guilty of a "fundamental misunderstanding" of the so-called war on terror.
‘BARBAROUS ACTS’: The captain of the fishing vessel said that people in checkered clothes beat them with iron bars and that he fell unconscious for about an hour Ten Vietnamese fishers were violently robbed in the South China Sea, state media reported yesterday, with an official saying the attackers came from Chinese-flagged vessels. The men were reportedly beaten with iron bars and robbed of thousands of dollars of fish and equipment on Sunday off the Paracel Islands (Xisha Islands, 西沙群島), which Taiwan claims, as do Vietnam, China, Brunei, Malaysia and the Philippines. Vietnamese media did not identify the nationalities of the attackers, but Phung Ba Vuong, an official in central Quang Ngai province, told reporters: “They were Chinese, [the boats had] Chinese flags.” Four of the 10-man Vietnamese crew were rushed
NEW STORM: investigators dubbed the attacks on US telecoms ‘Salt Typhoon,’ after authorities earlier this year disrupted China’s ‘Flax Typhoon’ hacking group Chinese hackers accessed the networks of US broadband providers and obtained information from systems that the federal government uses for court-authorized wiretapping, the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported on Saturday. The networks of Verizon Communications, AT&T and Lumen Technologies, along with other telecoms, were breached by the recently discovered intrusion, the newspaper said, citing people familiar with the matter. The hackers might have held access for months to network infrastructure used by the companies to cooperate with court-authorized US requests for communications data, the report said. The hackers had also accessed other tranches of Internet traffic, it said. The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs
STICKING TO DEFENSE: Despite the screening of videos in which they appeared, one of the defendants said they had no memory of the event A court trying a Frenchman charged with drugging his wife and enlisting dozens of strangers to rape her screened videos of the abuse to the public on Friday, to challenge several codefendants who denied knowing she was unconscious during their actions. The judge in the southern city of Avignon had nine videos and several photographs of the abuse of Gisele Pelicot shown in the courtroom and an adjoining public chamber, involving seven of the 50 men accused alongside her husband. Present in the courtroom herself, Gisele Pelicot looked at her telephone during the hour and a half of screenings, while her ex-husband
Scientists yesterday announced a milestone in neurobiological research with the mapping of the entire brain of an adult fruit fly, a feat that might provide insight into the brains of other organisms and even people. The research detailed more than 50 million connections between more than 139,000 neurons — brain nerve cells — in the insect, a species whose scientific name is Drosophila melanogaster and is often used in neurobiological studies. The research sought to decipher how brains are wired and the signals underlying healthy brain functions. It could also pave the way for mapping the brains of other species. “You might
RSS