A new hang-up for Sen. John F. Kerry's presidential campaign: He is getting stood up at Meetup.com.
Trying to emulate Howard Dean's vast success on the Internet, Kerry's campaign in June entered into a partnership with Meetup.com, the Web site Dean has used to assemble and organize thousands of people around the country. But it has not gone well in cyberspace.
They say former governor Howard Dean is from Vermont. But it's clear in this photograph that the Democratic candidate is from jersey.
(John Pettit -- Deanforamerica.com)
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"Not enough Kerry Supporters near Manchester-Nashua-Concord, N.H., can make it, so this month's Meetup is cancelled," Meetup announced on its Web site before Thursday's Kerry meeting in the first primary state. According to Meetup statistics, this has been part of a troubling pattern for Kerry.
In July, about 3,000 Kerry fans attended 125 Meetup events across the country, while 352 were canceled. In August, about 2,100 fans attended 114 events, while 300 were canceled. And in September, only about 1,500 attended 89 events, while a whopping 481 were canceled because fewer than five people had confirmed their attendance.
The Dean numbers show the opposite. In July, about 25,000 people attended 315 events, with 213 canceled. In August, 33,000 appeared at 384 events, with 222 canceled. And in September, fully 40,000 attended 664 events; 205 were canceled.
The Dean triumph has been slightly marred by word of foul play in New York at a Kerry Meetup last week. Sixty people were to attend an event at a coffeehouse on Broadway, but signs on the door directed them to a different -- and fictitious -- address.
Greasing the Slippery Slope
President Bush has met his campaign promise to be a "uniter, not a divider" -- not of the country, but of the Republican Party.
A poll released Thursday shows that Bush has become nearly as polarizing a figure as President Bill Clinton was at the depths of the Monica Lewinsky scandal. The nonpartisan Pew Research Center found that 66 percent of Republicans approve "very strongly" of Bush, while 48 percent of Democrats disapprove very strongly. In September 1998, 69 percent of Democrats approved very strongly of Clinton, while 51 percent of Republicans disapproved very strongly.
The survey was the latest bringing bad tidings to Bush as he begins his reelection bid. A Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll last week found that the number of voters approving of Bush had slipped to 49 percent, the lowest of his presidency.
But lest Democrats become irrationally exuberant, the Pew poll found that only 39 percent of Americans were able to name one of the 10 announced candidates for the party's presidential nomination.
Sharpton's 'F' for Nomenclature
Al Sharpton, the preacher turned presidential candidate, offered an innovative proposal at last week's Democratic debate. "I would not do anything that would jeopardize America," he said. "But I think things like F-11 bombers and other unnecessary military equipment, we need to take the money away."
Sharpton is certainly correct that eliminating the F-11 bomber would not jeopardize America. There is no F-11 bomber in the Pentagon's inventory. There was an F-111 fighter-bomber, but the Clinton administration retired that one. It's possible Sharpton was thinking of the F-117 stealth fighter.
Sharpton's campaign is researching his Delphic utterance.
The Yankee Red Sox Phillies Phan
Caught stealing? In this space last week, Kerry's campaign identified Dean as a Yankees fan (that's treason in nearby New Hampshire) and proved it with some old quotations from Dean. But at a rally in Boston on Tuesday, Dean, who argues that he dumped the Yankees as his team in 2000, donned a Red Sox cap and said of the Yankees owner: "Eat your heart out, George Steinbrenner."
The Kerry campaign called Dean's "inexplicable" flip-flop akin to dumping the Redskins for the Cowboys. And it gets worse: A photo on the Dean campaign Web site shows the candidate wearing the jersey of the . . . Philadelphia Phillies.
C.L., This Is Not About You
Only a couple of weeks after former Gore strategist Chris Lehane quit the Kerry campaign, Lehane's wife, San Francisco lawyer Andrea Evans, has agreed to work for Wesley K. Clark's campaign. Evans will serve as a liaison between the communications and policy shops in Clark's nascent campaign in Little Rock; there, she'll join Mary Jacoby, who quit her job with the St. Petersburg Times's Washington bureau last week to be a Clark spokeswoman.
Quotable
"I aspire to inspire before I expire."
-- Singer and writer Kinky Friedman, who has been an overnight guest of President Bush at the White House, telling the San Antonio Express-News why he is likely to run for Texas governor in 2006.
