Glenn Reynolds takes a look at an alternate universe where John Kerry actually makes sense.
That’s the Democrats’ problem. George W. Bush should be behind by 20 points right now. But Kerry has completely and utterly screwed up his campaign time and time again. His convention speech resulted in a bounce that was slim to none. George W. Bush has very high negatives, yet Kerry can’t pull ahead of Bush by more than a few points for a short time. Kerry made the horrendous tactical mistake of making this election about his Vietnam service.
I’m actually thinking the Democrats would have been better of nominating Dean after all. Dean, for all his many faults, was an honest candidate. He was exciting. He was willing to run as a fiscal conservative. He had significant executive experience.
In fact, of all the serious Democratic contenders for 2004, Kerry was the weakest (Graham, Kucinich, Braun, and Sharpton don’t count as “serious contenders” by the way.) Gephardt would have appealed to the blue collar voters that may end up in the Bush camp on the war (the 9/11 Democrats). Edwards had the personal magnetism that Kerry severely lacks. Lieberman could have swept the moderate conservative vote and easily beaten Bush, had the far-left wing of the party not rejected him. Clark’s Vietnam record and subsequent military experience doesn’t have the shadowy side that Kerry’s did.
Kerry’s campaign is quite possibly one of the worst in modern political history, and his attempts to attack the Swift Boat vets is guaranteed to backfire on him. At this point Kerry could have easily dismissed the charges as a partisan attack and steered the direction of the campaign back to the economy where Kerry has considerable traction. Instead Kerry brought out the lawyers and the FEC – which virtually guaranteed that the Swift Boat ads would be seen by far more people than it would have normally.
Of course, the Bush team hasn’t been hitting out of the park either. However, the Kerry campaign has been a train wreck from the beginning, and even some Democrats are beginning to worry about the closeness of the race. Kerry certainly isn’t down for the count, as much as Bush supporters would like to think, and Bush needs to hit it out of the park in New York to pull ahead. Still, Kerry has taken what could have been a convincing way of attracting swing voters and forging an alliance with moderate Republicans that would have easily gotten him to the White House and instead flip-flopped his way between appeals to the center and appeals to the left – neither of which appear credible. Had Kerry followed Reynolds advice and developed a coherent Iraq strategy as well as other coherent policies – and ran on them rather than events nearly four decades old, Bush would be getting ready to move back to Crawford right now. Instead Kerry has mired himself in a scandal that he himself has blown all out of proportion through mistimed and misguided attacks on the Swift Boat vets.
UPDATE: On the other hand, NZ Bear argues that if Kerry were that smart, he wouldn’t be John Kerry…
This alternate universe scenario points out the glaring flaws in both Kerry and the current Democratic party.
I agree with NZ Bear: if Kerry had been like this, he wouldn’t have been Kerry, and if the Dem party had nominated him, then it just wouldn’t have been the Dem party.
The Dem party has lurched incredibly leftward in this election cycle. At least Dean would have been honest in representing this.
Can’t say much about the others, JR, but Howard Dean would be equally as bad as or worse than Kerry. His “executive experience” came at the expense of Vermont taxpayers on every level, but especially through the local property tax which was appropriated by the state during his 2nd term by his appointed liberal judges’ rulings on education equality issues (an important topic for another day).
Dean’s fortunes as governor came from the preceding Republican Governor Richard Snelling’s putting in place the groundwork for returning economic discipline and prosperity. When Snelling died of a heart attack in the middle of his term, Lt. Gov. Dean inherited a sound business plan for the future. Dean rode that horse until his second term when his party upped the ante and began to drive through numerous expensive social policies, including the universal youth healthcare he touts which, along with education spending, is now bankrupting us. Until recently, the Lt. Gov. job in Vermont had been largely ceremonial.
Like Kerry, Dean is a career politician, having no real experience in business. You can argue that running government is like running a business, but if that were the case, we would not be paying people to do nothing and produce nothing and prop up ineffective service industries, which our welfare, farm policies and public education monopoly do.
It’s pretty amazing that this is still the greatest country of economic opportunity where the biggest and best companies get their start by talented, energetic and forward thinking leadership, yet we elect buffoons and cartoons to ru(i)n the country.
Trice: the problem with the country electing “buffoons and cartoons” to political office is that the poltical environment discourages most of the best people from running.
It’s accepted practice in politics that anything will be done to attack and savage and tear down the opponent. And everyone can be made to look bad in one way or another.
However, that very nature of politics also means that we will generally think of our elected leaders in a less favorable light than other leaders in our society. They will get far more scrutiny and far more criticism.
So I think that some of our elected leaders are not always that bad, but that the nature of politics makes them look worse than they would otherwise be perceived.
Kerry is one super weak candidate…and one who betrayed the same soldiers he now wants to claim as his own.
Kerry’s real band of brothers were the Jane Fonda-type antiwar protesters, who told lies about our Vietnam soldiers.
Thanks to Kerry, many Vietnam vets suffered…Kerry lied, and our POWs were tortured for it, and when many vets came home, they suffered for it…
Agreed, AT, on discouraging political environment. My own participation at the local level provides more than enough headaches to stifle my civic ambitions.
Regarding Kerry and his rewriting history: As I monitor the MSM and PBS against internet & radio, and after Bush’s “denouncement” of the SBVT and 527 ads today, it still looks like Kerry is winning this round. They are saying Kerry may get hurt some in the short run (especially with Veterans, so far), but longer term will backfire on Bush, whether he’s connected with the ads or not. If that happens, it’s because the MSM cover for Kerry is working, since it looks like he’s not going to give up the remaining service records and the charges will never really be proven one way or another. The fact that Kerry won’t offer up the documents and settle the matter should tell everyone all they need to know about the creep.
This may be a stupid question, but how is it that the disclosure of military records can be controlled by individual veterans?
This may be a stupid question, but how is it that the disclosure of military records can be controlled by individual veterans?
Constitutional right to privacy? I’m not trying to be a smartass, that’s just my guess – it’s a privacy issue.