Kerry Event Sticks to Music, Message

The protest sign waved outside of Sen. John F. Kerry’s latest celebrity fundraiser Monday night said it all: “Where’s Whoopi?”

On Thursday, actress and comedian Whoopi Goldberg sparked controversy at a New York gala for the presumed Democratic presidential nominee with a comic routine that used President Bush’s surname as a sexual euphemism.

Harsh criticism of Bush by other celebrities at the event also raised hackles, and caused the Kerry campaign the next day to distance itself from the remarks.

Kerry’s Monday night musicale, at which the Massachusetts senator appeared with rock musician Jackson Browne, singer-songwriter Michelle Branch and a gospel choir, was tame by comparison.

Browne, for instance, resisted any temptation to dedicate his anthem “The Pretender” to Bush. It was left to Kerry to subtly make a connection.

“Jackson wrote a lot of songs about this campaign,” Kerry told the audience of several thousand. “ ‘Knock on Any Door’ he wrote for our campaign workers. ‘Running on Empty’ he wrote for the Republican Party. And ‘The Pretender’? Well, I’ll be nice.”

Kerry spokesman David Wade said that the campaign was not chastened by the New York event, which brought howls from Republican officials.

“Tonight we had a respectful, energizing concert that made a sold-out crowd feel good about electing John Kerry -- more than about defeating George Bush,” Wade said.

The event capped a day in Boston in which Kerry raised more than $4 million for his campaign and the Democratic Party and reached out to various constituencies that could be key to his chances of winning in November -- particularly women and minorities.

Kerry derided Bush for rejecting an invitation to speak this week to the annual convention of the National Assn. for the Advancement of Colored People.

And responding to one of Bush’s latest criticisms of him, Kerry argued that his values mirror those of average citizens, while the president’s do not.

Kerry, who plans to address the NAACP on Thursday, met with more than 200 Latino, African American and Asian American local politicians at a black-owned hotel in a federal empowerment zone in the morning and then spoke to more than 1,000 female supporters at a lunch.

“Values are making certain that we respect the existing constitutional rights of Americans and making certain that women in the United States maintain the right to privacy and the right to choose” an abortion, Kerry said at the luncheon. Kerry has stressed recently that although he is not personally in favor of abortion, he thinks it should remain a legal option.

He also said: “Values are not extolling the virtues of our country and our rights and our freedoms and our democracy and then turning around and for political purposes in the middle of the campaign for the first time in history try to amend the Bill of Rights of our nation.”

Kerry was referring to a Senate vote, expected this week, on a proposed constitutional amendment defining marriage as a union between a man and a woman.

Kerry and his running mate, Sen. John Edwards of North Carolina, plan to be in Washington when the amendment comes to a vote.

The two have said they do not support legalizing same-sex marriage, but they back civil unions between homosexual couples.

They oppose the proposed constitutional amendment that Bush is pushing.