FOX News Channel anchor Brigitte Quinn said she was “a little baffled” that Senator John Kerry, in his speech at midnight on September 3, criticized President George W. Bush's and Vice President Dick Cheney's Vietnam-era service (or lack thereof) instead of talking about domestic issues. In fact, after his brief response to attacks levied against him all week at the Republican National Convention, Kerry spent the vast majority of his speech discussing domestic issues including jobs, taxes, health care, and energy independence.
From the September 3 edition of FOX News Channel's FOX News Live:
QUINN: All right, and you know it was interesting that we heard a lot from the Kerry camp: “Why don't we hear details on a domestic agenda from President Bush?” He gave some details last night, or at least some proposals. And then the response by Kerry last night at that late-night rally again was about Vietnam, attacking Dick Cheney and George Bush. Um, I'm a little baffled by that.
Perhaps Quinn's bafflement stems from the fact that, as Media Matters for America has documented, FOX aired only four minutes of Kerry's speech (while MSNBC aired 25 minutes and CNN aired 15 minutes). Here's an excerpt from Kerry's speech:
KERRY: Four years ago, George Bush offered America a plan for our economy. But once again he misled America. Because he told you four years ago that if we had these great big tax cuts, he was going to create 5.6 million jobs. He told you, he told you that he was going to create -- he was going to create 266,000 jobs right here in Ohio. Ohio -- Ohio lost 230,000 jobs. Ohio lost 112,000 jobs from the date after the recession ended, after he had promised a new round of a million jobs. My friends, it's too late two months before an election to come leaping into a convention and make a bunch of promises when you haven't even kept the promises that you made before.
And I'll tell you what John Edwards and I know. I've met workers out here in Ohio who've not only lost their jobs and watched them go overseas, but who've actually had to unbolt the equipment that they worked on and put it in a crate to follow the job that went overseas. You didn't hear anything about that tonight, but let me tell you something: When John Edwards and I get in there with your help, we're going to take that tax code that you're paying for, and we're going to change what they're supporting and encouraging, which is asking you to actually reward those companies to take the jobs overseas. When John Edwards and I are in there, we're not only not going to award the companies that take the jobs overseas, we're going to close that loophole. No American worker will ever be asked to subsidize the loss of their own job.
And you know what else we're going to do? We're going to do something that makes common sense, which is something we need to restore to the main street of America. We're going to actually take the money that now goes to the companies overseas, and we're going to reward the companies that create the manufacturing jobs right here in the United States of America. That makes sense.
Let me tell you what else we're going to do. We're going to start to do what America does best. Every single one of you knows the power of our country comes from our spirit, from the American spirit of ingenuity, of creativity, of exploration, of science. And John and I are going to re-commit America to the discovery and the creation of those new jobs that pay you more than the $9,000 less for the jobs that are going overseas. We need a president who fights as hard for your jobs as he fights for his own job, and that's exactly what we're going to do that over the course of these next years. We're going to --
AUDIENCE: Kerry! Kerry! Kerry!
KERRY: We're also -- we've gone four years. You've gone four years, and all across America as John and I travel with Elizabeth and Theresa, we're meeting families who look us in the eyes and say, “I can't afford it anymore. We can't get health care. There's no way to pay the increasing premiums that have gone up 50 percent.” Tuitions have gone up 35 percent. Gas prices up 31 percent. And wages -- wages have gone down. I'll tell you this. When I'm president of the United States, that tax code that belongs to you, that's 17,000 pages long today and you don't have a page of it -- we're going to put that back in the scrutiny of all Americans, and we are going to make America's workplace fair again, so it works for the average American. And George Bush talked about health care four years ago, talked about health care for the last four years -- talked, talked and talked. But the fact is that in the last year, 1.4 million Americans lost their health care. In the last four years, five million Americans have lost their health care.
We're now up to 45 million Americans who go to sleep at night who don't know what to do. Pray they don't get sick, don't know where to turn. And only John Edwards and John Kerry have put before America a plan that says your family's health care is just as important as any politician in Washington, D.C. We're going to provide health care to all Americans. We've also seen George Bush make America more dependent, not less, on fuel oil that comes from other countries. God only gave us 3 percent of the world's oil reserves, folks. That didn't change during the time George Bush has been president. And we import 61 percent of our oil. Yet we're still not moving down the road of discovery, which would create millions of new jobs in this country. We need to change the president and have a president who understands no young American in uniform should ever be held hostage to America's dependence on oil in the Middle East. We're going to liberate ourselves. We're going to make ourselves energy independent.