It finally happened. Bob Mate's ignorance ticked me off enough to write a Viewpoint. In his Sept 21 column, "Kerry campaign quagmire needs rapid solution," Mate revealed his lack of political expertise when stating that Wisconsin was dressed up as a battleground state despite its measly 10 electoral votes. If Mate had checked the facts, he would have noticed that in 2000 Wisconsin was won by Al Gore by less than one-fifth of one percentage point; making it one of the most closely contested states in the Union, and that in 2004 Wisconsin's 10 electoral votes could well be enough to determine the outcome of the election, seeing as only three votes determined the presidency last time around.

Mate also claimed that Wisconsin was a "den of inequity and filth," but just like most liberal noisemakers, Mate was content to simply say something that might sound cool and not introduce anything afterwards to back up his claim, as there is no further mention of the great state of Wisconsin after his dubious verbal assault on the Badger State.

I did agree with one thing that Mate says. He claimed that the reason why President Bush is enjoying encouraging numbers nationwide is because Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) has not successfully defined himself. However, I would like to take this one step further. If Kerry was going to define himself while running against an incumbent president, wasn't the time to do that in the primaries? At the Convention? When? Kerry has run through the primaries, had his Reinvention Convention, and yet still Mate wonders why the junior senator from Massachusetts hasn't yet defined himself. Maybe it's because Kerry doesn't have anything to define himself or his candidacy on.

Maybe it's because Kerry wanted to make the centerpiece of his campaign not a vision for the next four years, but revisionist history of what happened the better part of three decades ago. This all became evident in a nine-minute biographical video leading up to Kerry's acceptance speech. The video trumpeted the four short months he spent in Vietnam, yet said nothing at all about his 19 years in the Senate. Does Kerry have nothing to show for those 19 years?

Maybe he could show how he joined with Democrats and Republicans to vote for the No Child Left Behind Act that created accountability for teachers who do not teach and students who do not learn. Oh wait, he's against that now. Maybe then he could talk about how he made the tough choice to approve military action in Iraq to remove a brutal dictator from power and liberate 22 million people. Oh wait, he's against that too.

Kerry cannot define himself for what he is because Kerry does not even know what he is. His sense of political vision has a horizon of next week's Gallup Poll as evidenced by his consistent flip-flopping on every issue of national importance from the war on terror, to education reform, to more effective tools for law enforcement.

So as you go to the polls on Nov. 2, you have two choices before you. You can vote for a strong leader led by principle with a vision for this country's next four years, or you can vote for an indecisive east coast liberal who can't even seem to stand by his own votes.

Sever is a junior political science major.

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