[MavKikiNYC]

Two points:

1) Personal character is and always will be a legitimate issue in elections. There will be times when enough voters may either be ignorant of the facts or may choose to discount the character issue to such an extent that a president like Clinton (or a senator like Clinton, or a senator like any Kennedy) gets elected. But many voters will want to make some sort of character assessment about a political candidate, and compare his/her behavior to their own, or at least to what the voter belives to be right.

This is completely understandable to me. Voters may not understand all the complexities of an issue like national defense, or jobs creation, or rebuilding a government in Iraq, or tax cuts, or economic stimulae ( I know I don't understand everything about these issues, and I read and follow most of these issues pretty closely). So when faced with a choice, voters may very rightly and logically seek to get a read on a more personal level--how do they relate to the candiate? How closely does he/she represent their views? Would he/she do what I (the voter) would do in the same situation? If a voter places a high significance on marital fidelity as an index of personal character, that is: 1) completely his/her right; and 2) actually pretty reasonable.

Voters who don't value personal character, or who, for example, don't place a high value on marital fidelity as an indicator of personal character, are free to discount these issues. But the voters who do are completely within their right and reason to do so.

2) Kerry's alleged indiscretions would have occurred within the last 2-3 years, if I'm reading the timeline correctly, which would mean that his propensity to lie to his wife his very recent, perhaps even current and ongoing, making it, for those who value personal character, an all-the-more salient indicator of his trustworthiness. An extra-mariital affair by Kerry in the last couple of years, especially in the wake of the fatally irresponsible Clinton incident(s), would cast a cloud on his personal character AND his political judgment. IMO, this incident would be FAR more relevant and revealing than his anti-war activities from 30 years ago, because they represent the CURRENT man.

Simiarly, the Democrats pathetically tired attempts to trash Bush the President with some kind of sketchy, insubstantial, exaggerated, unsubstantiated, and unsubstantiatable shadow-accusations (by the piece of trash Michael Moore, no less), by Bush the National Guardsman 30 years ago just don't hold up.

Bush has definitely shown that he's up to the challenge of acting as Commander in Chief in war time, with decisive responses to acts of war/terrorism (no longer differentiated) that the amoral, character-defective Clinton would never have been able to
accomplish.

If voters choose to examine Bush's accomplishments as a war-time president, and then compare those accomplishments to Clinton's failure to act, they will very likely be left to wonder about whether Kerry would act as President more like Bush, or more like Clinton. My guess is that the comparison will not be favorable for Kerry.