Misc Commentary For August 2, 2004

02 Aug, 2004 by John Hawkins

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— Since I was a big fan of M. Night Shyamalan’s “Signs,” I was looking forward to seeing “The Village” this week-end. So was it another world beating “Signs” or a good, but not great movie like “Unbreakable”? Well, unfortunately, while the movie wasn’t a stinker, it was kind of slow and I had basically the same reaction to it that my parents had to “From Dusk Til Dawn”, which was “I liked the movie until evrybody turned into vampires”! While there were no vampires in this one, there were some twists of that magnitude and I liked the movie less & less after each one happened. So let’s just call it a thumbs-in-the-middle, perhaps leaning slightly skywards because I thought Bryce Dallas Howard’s character, Ivy Walker, was just about the most likeable female character I’ve ever seen in a movie.

— I hadn’t seen any poll numbers on the first ladies, but Deborah Orin managed to find numbers somewhere…

“Mrs. Bush is rated 66 percent favorable and 12 percent unfavorable — a 5-to-1 positive ratio — while Heinz Kerry is rated 27 percent favorable and 26 percent unfavorable.”

— More poll numbers, this time from John Tierney at the New York Times…

“But do journalists really want John Kerry to defeat George W. Bush? It depends where they work and how you ask the question, at least according to the unscientific survey we conducted last weekend during a press party at the convention. We got anonymous answers from 153 journalists, about a third of them based in Washington.

When asked who would be a better president, the journalists from outside the Beltway picked Mr. Kerry 3 to 1, and the ones from Washington favored him 12 to 1. Those results jibe with previous surveys over the past two decades showing that journalists tend to be Democrats, especially the ones based in Washington. Some surveys have found that more than 80 percent of the Beltway press corps votes Democratic.”

What liberal bias, right?

— John Kerry is a billionaire with “five homes and vacation getaways across the country valued at nearly $33 million” and a wife who’s so pampered and out of touch with ordinary people that she doesn’t even know what chili is, and yet he’s presenting himself as a populist who’s going to protect the “little guys” from…well…other people like him I guess.

Is that an “only in America” story or what?