Inside Politics

Weak turnout

Rosie O’Donnell addressed a nearly vacant Club Ovation Saturday night in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., during a get-out-the-vote rally for Democratic presidential hopeful Sen. John Kerry, reports Matt Drudge at his Web site (www.drudgereport.com).

“’You know, there’s only like, you know, maybe 38 of us here, and maybe we can just like tap a keg and put on some disco, and totally party,’” Miss O’Donnell deadpanned.

“The debacle came one night after only a couple hundred came out to see Cher rally for Kerry at Miami Beach’s Crobar disco,” Mr. Drudge said.

“’There were supposed to be thousands of people here tonight. I’m not sure why that didn’t happen; obviously, the people putting on this thing were just not very good at it,’ an embarrassed Cher explained to the crowd.

“A top Florida Democratic Party official dismissed the weak back-to-back club turnouts as any indication of voter enthusiasm for the Kerry candidacy.”

Closer in Kentucky

Kentucky Democrat Daniel Mongiardo has cut into the comfortable lead that incumbent Sen. Jim Bunning held just a month ago in their bitterly fought contest, according to a Bluegrass Poll released yesterday.

The poll, published in the Courier-Journal of Louisville, showed Mr. Bunning is leading by six percentage points. The poll’s margin of error was 3.7 percentage points.

A similar poll taken in September showed a 17-point lead for Mr. Bunning, who is seeking his second term in the Senate.

The race has made national headlines in recent weeks as the two have traded barbs, the Associated Press notes.

The new poll, conducted by phone Monday through Wednesday, found 49 percent of likely voters would vote for Mr. Bunning and 43 percent prefer Mr. Mongiardo. Nine percent were undecided. Numbers do not add up to 100 percent because of rounding.

October? Surprise

“The Army has agreed to a Pentagon investigation into claims by a top contracting official that a Halliburton subsidiary unfairly won no-bid contracts worth billions of dollars for work in Iraq and the Balkans,” the Associated Press reports, citing Army documents it obtained.

The woman’s complaint charges that the award of contracts without competition puts at risk “the integrity of the federal contracting program as it relates to a major defense contractor.”

The complaint also “asks protection from retaliation for the whistleblower, Bunnantine Greenhouse, chief contracting officer of the Army Corps of Engineers,” AP reports.

A Halliburton spokeswoman, Wendy Hall, described the complaints as “old allegations [that] have once again been recycled, this time one week before the election.” Miss Hall said that Halliburton is “proud to serve the troops just as we have for the past 60 years, for both Democrat and Republican administrations.”

Democrats have tried to make the company’s defense contracts a focus of the presidential campaign because Vice President Dick Cheney was chief executive of Halliburton until 2000.

Low profile

One of the less-publicized hires at the Democratic National Committee is its new religious-affairs director, Alexia K. Kelley, who replaces the Rev. Brenda Bartella Peterson. Mrs. Peterson resigned after The Washington Times reported on Aug. 4 that she had supported an effort to remove the words “under God” from the Pledge of Allegiance.

That may explain why Miss Kelley, a Roman Catholic, was not returning phone calls from this newspaper seeking more details about her background. We do know she has an interest in social ethics, nonprofits and anti-poverty groups. She was most recently program director at Environmental Resources Trust in the District, which focuses on renewable energies. She also worked nine years for the Catholic Campaign for Human Development.

She has a master’s degree in theological studies from Harvard Divinity School, with a focus on social ethics. A book she co-edited, “Living the Catholic Social Tradition,” is due out next month. She is also a founding board member of the Language, Education and Technology Center, a nonprofit in the District that teaches English and reading to immigrants.

Latest numbers

President Bush maintained a two-point lead on Democratic rival Sen. John Kerry for the third consecutive day, according to a Reuters/Zogby poll released yesterday.

Mr. Bush led Mr. Kerry 48 percent to 46 percent in the latest three-day tracking poll, a statistical dead heat. Mr. Bush’s lead among likely voters the previous day was 47 percent to 45 percent.

The number of undecided voters in the poll fell to 4 percent. Neither candidate has been able to break 50 percent since the poll began Oct. 7, although Mr. Bush reached 50 percent in the last of the three days of polling on Saturday that went into the survey.

This latest survey contained 1,207 likely voters chosen at random nationwide and polled Thursday through Saturday. The poll had a margin of error of 2.9 percentage points.

Other polls also show a close race, although they suggest that Mr. Bush has a razor-thin lead. A Newsweek survey released on Saturday gave Mr. Bush a single-point lead among likely voters, also statistically insignificant. A Time magazine poll, however, said Mr. Bush’s lead had widened to five points.

Newspaper surrenders

A British newspaper that set off a trans-Atlantic political firestorm when it urged its readers to write to Ohio voters in an attempt to sway their ballot choice in the U.S. presidential race said yesterday that it had ended the campaign.

The Guardian newspaper said that it stopped giving out names and addresses of undecided voters after hackers broke into its Web site a week ago, effectively ending “Operation Clarke County.”

Editors also professed themselves overwhelmed with the response to the campaign — a response that included Guardian reporters being deluged with thousands of angry e-mails from Americans, the Associated Press reports.

The newspaper also has abandoned plans to take four of the best letter-writers to Springfield, Ohio, to meet voters. Instead, it will send the winners to the “more tranquil” Washington, D.C., for a vacation.

• Greg Pierce can be reached at 202/636-3285 or gpierce@washingtontimes.com.