Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry visited Ohio Saturday, his first campaign stop after the second presidential debate.
Senator Kerry greeted a crowd of about 20,000 for a Democratic rally in Lorain County, which has one of the highest concentrations of Democrats in Ohio, according to a rally coordinator.
At Lorain County Community College in Elyria, lines of people waiting to see the candidate stretched for more than a quarter-mile.
At the rally, Kerry reiterated several of the arguments he made in the presidential debate.
“I will succeed in Iraq where this president doesn’t know where he’s going,” he said, promising to convince countries in the United Nations to provide troops and money for the reconstruction of Iraq.
Kerry challenged Donald Rumsfeld’s estimate of 100,000 trained Iraqi police and said the number is closer to 22,000.
“I’m going to get [Iraqis] trained so our troops can come home,” Kerry said.
Health care was discussed in Kerry’s speech as well. “Every child in America will be covered, you go to school, you’re covered. And every family in America will have the right to buy in to the same health care plan that senators and congressmen give themselves.”
To lower health care costs, Kerry described a plan to set up a federal fund that would pay for the most expensive health care cases. This, Kerry said, will lower premiums for all health care recipients.
Kerry offered a single method to pay for his proposed policies. “We’re going to roll back that tax cut for folks making more than $200,000 a year,” he said.
Many attendants holding pro-Kerry signs, such as “Firefighers for Kerry” and “Women for Kerry,” cheered and applauded many times during the senator’s speech.
Ohio House representative Sherrod Brown introduced Kerry, preceded by representative Marcy Kaptur and former senator John Glenn.
Sharon Woolbright, a 23-year-old student of Lorain County Community College, attended the rally. “This year I’m into the election and I wanted to hear [what Kerry had to say] for myself,” she said.
Woolbright was decided on voting for Kerry before going to the rally. “I really believe Kerry could do a good job,” she said. “I believe that we’ll be in a better position than we are right now.”
