CONVENTIONS COMPLETED, MAJOR PARTY TICKETS SET...AND RALPH NADER; SITE OF FIRST PRESIDENTIAL DEBATE SEPTEMBER 30.

The campaigns of President Bush and Sen. John F. Kerry have tentatively settled on a package of three face-to-face debates that both sides view as a potentially decisive chance to sway huge audiences ahead of the Nov. 2 election, Democrats and Republicans said yesterday.

Bush's campaign opened the negotiations by urging just two sessions involving Bush and Kerry, but yielded to the full slate of debates that had been proposed by the Commission on Presidential Debates, according to people in both parties who were briefed on the negotiations.

No agreement will be final until the two sides agree on details for the format of a town-meeting-style debate that Bush at first resisted but now is willing to endorse, the party representatives said.

The debates will be spread over two weeks just before the hectic homestretch of a bitter contest, which had been tied for months until Bush recently opened a small lead in a number of national polls. The nominees will focus on foreign policy during the opening session, on Sept. 30 in Florida; they will take questions from undecided voters at the town-meeting-style debate Oct. 8 in Missouri; and they will conclude with a session on Oct. 13 in Arizona that will revolve around domestic issues.

Vice President Cheney and Democratic vice presidential nominee John Edwards will debate Oct. 5 in Ohio. Each of the four debates will begin at 9 p.m. Eastern time and will run 90 minutes...

The Sept. 30 debate will be held at the University of Miami in Coral Gables and will be moderated by Jim Lehrer, anchor and executive editor of "The NewsHour" on PBS. The Oct. 8 town-hall debate will be moderated by Charles Gibson, co-anchor of ABC's "Good Morning America." The Oct 13 debate will be at Arizona State University in Tempe. The questioner will be Bob Schieffer, CBS News chief Washington correspondent and moderator of "Face the Nation."

The Oct. 5 vice presidential debate will be held at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland and will be moderated by Gwen Ifill, senior correspondent of "The NewsHour" and moderator of PBS's "Washington Week..."

The making of JFK the second

 by Paul Reynolds, BBC News Online world affairs correspondent
Sunday, 8 February, 2004

Senator John F Kerry's rise as the Democratic Party's presidential front-runner has sent governments around the world scrambling to find out who this second JFK from Massachusetts really is.  They will find a politician who is liberal on domestic issues and more conservative in foreign policy. Rather like John Fitzgerald Kennedy himself.
 

"Part of the American melting pot"

And like JFK the first (whom he knew when he was going out with Jacqueline Kennedy's half-sister) Mr Kerry is running less on his policies than on his personality.  He seems to be the man chosen to defeat President Bush because he has a certain gravitas born of his long years in the Senate.  He is not entirely predictable on foreign policy.  He voted in favour of the war against Iraq in 2002 but has since been critical of American policy in Iraq.

He opposed President Bush senior's action to remove Iraq from Kuwait in 1991 but he was in favour of military action in Afghanistan, Kosovo, Somalia and Panama.

Military record

However he is critical of President Bush junior's leadership, saying that the United States has to re-enter the "community of nations", so a more moderate foreign policy might be expected under a Kerry administration.  He has made much of both his military service in Vietnam (which Mr Bush avoided by joining up with the Texas Air National Guard) and his subsequent opposition to the war.  Kerry was decorated for his duty in Vietnam.  He can therefore present himself as someone who has done his duty, who knows war firsthand (he captained a gunboat in the Mekong Delta) and yet who also knows the limitations of war.

The contrast with George Bush is there without having to be spelled out.  That he had an instinct for politics early on was shown when he came back from Vietnam and asked a congressional committee: "How do you ask a man to be the last man to die in Vietnam? How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?"

That he had an instinct for shrewdness was also shown when he was with a group of veterans who threw their medals onto the steps of the Capitol.  In fact, Kerry threw only his ribbons and kept his medals.

Mixed background

Unlike JFK the first, this one, though a Catholic from Massachusetts and with the name of Kerry, is not Irish by background.  The 'F' in his initials stands for Forbes, his mother's name.  One of her forebears was an Anglican clergyman.  Her own mother was a Winthrop, one of the founding families of New England.

But Kerry also has Jewish roots. His grandfather was born Fritz Kohn in what is now the Czech Republic.  Kohn emigrated to the United States and changed his name to Kerry in 1907.

He was a successful businessman though he committed suicide by shooting himself in a hotel room.  Kerry says he remembers his grandmother as a practicing Catholic.
She had in fact been born Jewish and converted.  Thus, John F Kerry is very much part of the American melting pot.

But he is no son of the soil or toil. His own father was a diplomat and the family was always comfortably off.  Kerry went to schools in Switzerland, to a good private establishment in New Hampshire and then to Yale, where he joined the secret Skull and Bones club as did George W Bush, two years his junior.

Lucky man

It is quite convenient really. He has solid Yankee connections, an interesting immigrant background and a lot of folk in Massachusetts probably think he is Irish anyway.

Not a bad for a presidential candidate.  Democrats are seeking a candidate with a conventional approach.  And if his voting record on domestic issue is liberal (he is in favour of abortion and gay rights and is solid on the environment) he is no bleeding heart.  He was a tough prosecutor and went into state politics on the back of his record.  Perhaps above all, he is a something of a lucky politician and a lucky man.

He has married two heiresses. Oscar Wilde might have remarked that to marry one is fortunate but to marry two looks like calculation.

His political timing is certainly good. He has come to the fore at the very moment when the Democrats realised that they were seeking not the radical approach of a Howard Dean, but the conventional approach of a long serving senator.  Success now also means something else. He will be come under relentless scrutiny.

It has already been noted that he has had friends who are congressional lobbyists, though he denies that there have been any quid pro quos.  Republicans have come to range their guns on him.  He is being portrayed as a liberal in the Edward Kennedy mould.

Expect much more of this if he wins the nomination.

They told a Seattle conference that the new systems may be less reliable than those used four years ago.  The issue of voting systems came to the fore during the
controversy over ballot papers in the crucial state of Florida.  The question of what really counts as a vote - a clear hole in a ballot paper, or a bulge? - was hotly debated.
About 25% of the US electorate is expected to vote electronically in this year's November presidential election. This is up from around 15% in 2000.

Following the fiasco in Florida, the Bush administration passed a bill called the Help America Vote Act, aimed in part at persuading states to switch to electronic voting.  But Professor David Dill from Stanford University told the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science the switch may actually make things worse.

"The problem with electronic voting is your votes disappear into the electronic machine and there is no independent way to check that those results are valid," said Professor Dill.  "I know that I am not going to have a lot of confidence in the vote totals reported by those machines unless there is some independent polling or whatever that is consistent with that."

In recent years there has been a spate of disputes over local election results across the US involving voting machines.  There are many different models, and some provide the voter with no record of how he or she has voted - no evidence that the machine recorded the vote correctly.

The Brazil example

Professor Ted Selker, from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, told the meeting that the machines are not sufficiently secure.  He said there could and should be safeguards to prevent anyone tampering with their computer code before and after voting.  Data should be extracted from the machines after voting by someone other than the company which makes them, he continued.  Other countries, notably Brazil, he said, had introduced e-voting with appropriate safeguards and shown that it could work well.

"In the early 90s, they set up a system whereby three different organisations worked together - but they were separate.  "One came up with the requirements, one to make a reference software platform and finally the election commission to evaluate those. And through several elections they came up with better and better voting machines, which regained confidence in the government.