July 6, 2004: Democratic candidate John Kerry reaches for a boxing glove from someone in the crowd at Market Square in Downtown Pittsburgh.
It was here that U.S. Senator from Massachusetts announced that John Edwards would be his running mate on the Democratic ticket. But people at Market Square were not the first to get the scoop on Tuesday, according to the Post-Gazette.
“Bryan Smith,a 39-year-old US Airways mechanic, was the first to tell the world of Kerry’s choice. Smith, while at work Monday evening near Pittsburgh International Airport, spotted the Kerry campaign plane being affixed with Edwards decals. After leaving work, he posted the news at 11:45 pm on an obscure Web site known as usaviation.com.”
In doing so, Smith became the first person to report on Kerry’s VP choice, beating Kerry’s announcement at Market Square by full nine hours and scooping the nation’s largest newspapers and television networks — all of which were working tirelessly to break the story first.
The Bush/Cheney ticket defeated the Kerry/Edwards team by 35 electoral votes: Bush received 286 votes and Kerry received 251. George W. Bush was inaugurated for the second time on January 20th, 2005.
(Photo by Darrell Sapp, Post-Gazette)
