Kerry Draws Large Crowds In Mississippi

Kerry's strategy to take the election right into the heart of Bush country likely will cause the GOP to have a lot of concern especially after seeing the large crowds that Kerry has been attracting in states such as Louisiana and Mississippi.

"People are not going to look at Sen. Kerry and see Gov. Dukakis," says Mike Feldman, a Democratic consultant and member of Al Gore's campaign in 2000. "That playbook may have worked in 1988, but it's not going to work in 2004."

The GOP campaign tactics of trying to smear Kerry on gay issues did not work in Mississippi. The crowd cheered when Kerry responded to a hostile question on gay rights

"Let me tell you something, when Matthew Shepard gets crucified on a fence in Wyoming only because he was gay," he said, "when Mr. King gets dragged behind of a truck down in Texas by chains and his body is mutilated only because he's gay ? I think that's a matter of rights in the United States of America." (el - Kerry misspoke on King. I can't find what he is referring to but suspect he is blurring Rodney King and John William King (one of the murderers of James Byrd dragged behind King's pickup in chains supposedly for being black) and gay beatings in the south.)

Kerry's early campaign stops in the South differ substantially from the Gore campaign of 2000 which essentially wrote off all of the South.

But simply ceding the South to Mr. Bush gives him a huge leg up in the Electoral College, analysts said. Southern and border states ? Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas and Virginia ? total 172 electoral votes. That's only 98 short of the number needed to win the presidency. Kerry aides pointed out that one of his nine wins last week came in Georgia. He also won Southern primaries in Virginia and Tennessee. The Massachusetts senator does have a few things going for him in the South, analysts said. One is his experience as a Vietnam veteran. "That goes against that elitist, chardonnay-drinking image," said Mr. Teixeira. Mr. Kerry is also making a populist appeal to Southerners, saying they are being held down on jobs, education and health care while Mr. Bush takes care of his rich friends.