HOW KERRY LOST
www.HAMMERNEWS.com
http://hammernews.com/howkerry.htm
First he lost the Catholic vote. At 65 mil, they are 27% of the vote. Kerry got only 47% to Bush's 52%. If Kerry had even got a marginally respectable 55%- it would have been 5 mil more votes and definitely the election. John Kennedy got 78%. I advised appealing to the Vatican to order that the Church stay out of politics, because I think Pope and most advisors disliked Bush for ignorance and militarism much more than Kerry for abortion. Kerry could have tried to enlist non-rightist Catholic leaders to support him for social justice (health care for the poor), but he avoided it like the plague, as if we were in 60's and (Catholic) religion was a negative. http://www.religionwriters.com/public/tips/021804/021804a.shtml
Second he almost lost the Hispanic vote 52 to 47%. Gore had received a massive 69%. Bush had some natural advantages here, but there wasn't enough of an effort to specifically target them and their issues.
Third, Bush did 5 points better with women than he did with Gore- rather than confronting the misplaced paranoia about security issues and reassure security moms that they were a thousand times more likely to get killed driving to the store than in a terrorist attack, and then concentrate on home and health, he (necessarily) kept yapping about how well he would defend the country.
Fourth, the ballyhooed youth vote (18-29) was much weaker than hoped- only 52% voted and they didn't constitute a bigger group than in last election (17%). They only voted 54-46 for Kerry (though 64% turned out in 10 battleground states).
Fifth, the gay community blindsided him- the passing of gay marriage in Mass. crushed Kerry's hopes, driving massive numbers of religious and conservatives, inc. Catholics and Hispanic to vote for Bush (esp. in southern Ohio), in the 11 states that had banning gay marriage on the ballot. They won a few battles, but lost the war for half of the rest of the country- now it's likely the nutcakes will force the dangerous precedent of a Constitutional amendment to ban it.
Sixth, he ignored fervent advice to attack Bush on the LIES, and tried to be statesmanlike and speak to the best in America, as Bush cut his legs off with savage coward and weakling attacks. It would have exposed the truth about Bush "values", created great discomfort with Bush on a moral plane, inoculated JFK from all these lying attacks ("There he goes again."), and won him election, I'm absolutely convinced. The Repubs play politics as war, and the Dems play it as sport- the Repub attack machine is massive and reliable; the only way to deal with it is to shell it into rubble with their own crimes. Defending attacks is a losing strategy. Rove isn't so much a genius, as a skillful sleazy character assassin: slandering the opponent is how he wins every race. After years of inundation with propaganda on Iraq, 46% of the 2004 voters think the Iraq War has made us safer, a stunning level of delusion. That had to be drummed out of them. Howard Dean would have cleaned Bush's clock on that issue alone.
LAST: Maybe Kerry DID WIN. If there was widespread electronic machine fraud in the 30% of country that used them, we probably will never know. The only indication would be vastly different exit polls, which, oh, happened everywhere. The Dems did everything right in getting out the vote. If the machine chips were programmed to send 2 Bush votes for every one, then swapped after the election, or if hacking existed at the state levels- it may be impossible to prove, since Repub SoS's will resist any investigations till the cows come home. In Ohio, a ERM reported 3893 extra Bush votes in a 800 voter precinct. Florida, where 920,000 new people registered, was the most suspicious. Bush won by 381K in a state that Dems were relatively confident of. Reportedly, in Florida's Putnam Co., 48% voter turnout of 2000 jumped to 123%, and Bush's percentage jumped from 52% to 80%.
How can results be a duplicate of 2000 (with Kerry picking up NH and losing NM + IA), when Bush gleans 4,000,000 more votes. If so, he had to win more states. Where did these 4 million votes come from? Allegedly the result of massive turnout by the "faith-based", they seems to be concentrated in about 8 states: Tx, Ok, Tn, Al, Az, Fl, Ga- all well controlled by Repubs, but Bush did better everywhere. How can there be 8 hours waits in Ohio when only 10% more people are voting? Ohio SoS Blackwell was very determined to give Bush every advantage with the Repub voter challengers (which were allowed by a 2002 Bush-appointed judge at 4am Election Day), including limiting voting machines in Dem areas and enforcing the idiotic 11 day wait to count provisional ballots. Thousands gave up and went home there, as well as in Florida when confronted with insane waits on Monday when they opened only a few polling places. Nobody should have to wait over 3 hours to vote.
Michael Hammerschlag's commentary and articles (http://HAMMERNEWS.com) have appeared in Seattle Times, Providence. Journal, Columbia Journalism Review, Hawaii Advertiser, Capital Times, MediaChannel; and Moscow News, Tribune, Times, and Guardian. He's been a TV reporter, foreign correspondent, and produced documentaries. He reported on the media savaging of Howard Dean, and had the first big scoop on all the media mistakes on Election Night 2000.