The Philadelphia Daily News has endorsed John Kerry for president. It?s a bit early in the year for a general-election endorsement, but the Daily News is clearly up in arms:
Why make this endorsement now, when the election is months away? Because this race promises to be close and Pennsylvania is one of 18 swing states that can go to either candidate. For Kerry supporters to prevail they must do more than just vote, they must bring a ringer into this contest: the more than a million people in the region who did not vote in the last presidential election. We believe these non-voters – who will have to be mobilized over the next few months – are the key to victory.
Sounds like more than just an editorial endorsement, doesn?t it? In fact, it is more:
WHAT YOU NEED TO DO NOW
Make sure you are registered to vote. The deadline is Oct. 4, but do it now. If you haven’t voted in the last several elections or you’ve moved, call your county board of elections to make sure you’re properly registered.
To get a list of addresses and phone numbers for each county, check the Web site of the Committee of Seventy (www.seventy.org) or the the state (www.dos.state.pa.us/voting).
If you know you’re not registered, pick up a registration form at a state store, library or post office, fill it out, sign it and send it to your county board of elections. (Find the address on either of the above Web sites.)
You also can get a registration form online by going to www.dos.state.pa.us/voting. Make sure you fill in all the blanks and sign the form. You must use regular mail to send it in.
A quick recommendation from Bob Lee, Philadelphia’s voter registration administrator: Download the blank form and fill it in by hand. Don’t use the form that you can fill out on the computer. It’s a different size from the standard form and takes more time to process.
For more information about registering, voting, or the election process in general, check out the Web site of the Committee of Seventy listed above.
WHAT YOU NEED TO DO SOON
Get others to register to vote. You can do this on your own: Talk to friends, relatives, fellow members of your church, synagogue or mosque. Or you can volunteer for an organized voter-registration effort. AmericaVotes.org is a national coalition of progressive organizations spearheading national voter registration and mobilization.
If advocates of so-called campaign-finance reform ? including mainstream media commentators, editorial pages, and columnists ? were really serious, they would immediately an investigation of this huge in-kind contribution by a private corporation (Knight-Ridder, the owner of the Daily News) to a political campaign. They are not, so they won?t. They would say that the editorialists of Daily News have a First Amendment right to say what they want about an election.
Yes, they do. But so do the leaders, employees, and shareholders of any other private corporation, in any form they want. Knight-Ridder has no more right to attempt to sway the results of the presidential election than Coca-Cola, Citibank, Wal-Mart, or Microsoft do. There is no constitutional difference.
