Leaving the community

Actually, come to think of it, where Kerry really went wrong was by taking
all of the spotlight away from Edwards after the "pat on the ass" incident.
Had he plastered Edwards' face on the front of the ticket prominently next
to his, he would have gotten more of the women and gay men to come out and
vote for him - enough to win several of those borderline states!


Judah wrote in
:

I'm not sure I agree... I think Gephardt lost out because of nothing
short of a lack of charisma. I don't think people were paying that much
attention to positions or character during the primaries, and there
were way too many people on the list to go very deep. But if he wasn't
charismatic enough to beat Kerry on the Primaries, I'm not sure he
would have had what it took to beat Bush either. After all, Gore lost
on charisma too.

I think where Kerry blew it worst is that he never really recovered
from the whole "flip-flop" persona. He had opportunities to. But
basically, his only comeback was to say that he misspoke when he talked
about "voting for it before voting against it." From a public
perception, he was saying that he made a mistake by poorly describing
his flip-flopping, but never actually addressed the issue of
flip-flopping itself.

He didn't focus (as I think he should have) on the reality that
sometimes it is better to change your opinion in light of new facts
than to hold firm to a lie. He could have very easily turned the whole
thing around and put Bush in a defensive position - either the
President of the United States had the wool pulled over his eyes by his
own intelligence agency and is incompetent, or he had hidden motives
and went into Iraq based on a lie and pulled the wool over the eyes of
the American people and is undeserving. Instead, he left his own
trustworthiness unaddressed, and the public just didn't trust him. It
didn't help, either, that he constantly spoke about how he had a
"better plan" for Iraq, but never really qualified that with what the
plan was... Basically it left his credibility completely in question.

Either way, I think this is a much more serious issue than stem cell
research, or Gay Marraige. I strongly suspect that what the news media
is labelling "Moral Values" is not about the latter issues nearly as
much as about just general credibility. I guess liberals like me prefer
to give Kerry a chance, rather than let Bush go on pulling the wool
over our eyes (or allowing it to be pulled over our eyes by his staff).
Where conservatives would rather have someone they are comfortable with
in office than give the new, unpredictable guy a chance, especially if
he has shown he might not be perfect either.


No, I think the biggest problem in this election was simply that there
was not much difference at all between the two candidates, or if there
was, it was so clouded by nonessential issues that the general public
was left to vote on whether they are more comfortable with or without
change, and not much else.


"Jay Honeck" wrote in
news:k_bid.351511$MQ5.252777@attbi_s52:

These people are mad Kerry didn't run a liberal campaign and can't
stand that he "was just as pro-war as Bush."

That is SO ironic.

If the Democrats has nominated a middle-of-the-road guy to run against
Bush -- say, Dick Gephardt -- this election would not have even been
close. The Democrats would have swept the nation, and never by less
than 25 percentage points.

Stupidly, they nominated a guy whose political positions were to the
left of Ted Kennedy's, absolutely ensuring a Bush victory.

There were many traditional Republicans out here -- myself included --
who would have voted for a conservative Democrat in this election.
But there was just no way for any of us to vote for a guy like Kerry.

The moral for the Democrats: Don't ever nominate an ultra liberal to
run for president again.