If somebody has already posted on this, I apoligize, but I really like Arianna Huffington. I don't know how many people that read this site have her column sent to their email, but I highly suggest you do. Other diary entries have dealt with our "leaders" in Washington and Arianna has been highly critical of them herself.
She has been highly critical of the Kerry campaign since he lost, and I must say I have no argument with her points. Her current column tells us how much influence the "Clintonistas" had on the Kerry campaign, concentrating on domestic issues to the near exclusion of security/Iraq:
"If we can't win this damn election," the advisor to the Kerry campaign said, "with a Democratic Party more unified than ever before, with us having raised as much money as the Republicans, with 55% of the country believing we're heading in the wrong direction, with our candidate having won all three debates, and with our side being more passionate about the outcome than theirs -- if we can't win this one, then we can't win shit! And we need to completely rethink the Democratic Party."
Well, as it turns out, that's exactly what should be done. But instead, Carville and his fellow architects of the Democratic defeat have spent the last week defending their campaign strategy, culminating on Monday morning with a breakfast for an elite core of Washington reporters.
At the breakfast, Carville, together with chief campaign strategist Bob Shrum and pollster Stan Greenberg, seemed intent on one thing -- salvaging their reputations.
They blamed the public for not responding to John Kerry's message on the economy, and they blamed the news media for distracting voters from this critical message with headlines from that pesky war in Iraq. "News events were driving this," said Shrum. "The economy was not driving the news coverage."
Apparently our democratic leaders(including Clinton) thought domestic issues would trump everything, even though they were warned otherwise:
"We kept coming back from the road," said James Boyce, a Kerry family friend who traveled across the country with Cam Kerry, "and telling the Washington team that the questions we kept getting were more about safety and Iraq than healthcare. But they just didn't want to hear it. Their minds were made up."
I didn't know there was actually quite a war going on within the campaign, with a small group of advisors actually pushing Kerry to engage shrub on security/Iraq and the majority of the advisors telling him to concentrate on the domestics issues.
As Tom Vallely, the Vietnam War veteran whom Kerry tapped to lead the response to the Swift boat attacks, told me: "I kept telling Shrum that before you walk through the economy door, you're going to have to walk through the terrorism/Iraq door. But, unfortunately, the Clinton team, though technically skillful, could not see reality -- they could only see their version of reality. And that was always about pivoting to domestic issues. As for Shrum, he would grab on to anyone's strategy; he had none of his own."
Vallely, together with Kerry's brother, Cam, and David Thorne, the senator's closest friend and former brother-in-law, created the "Truth and Trust Team." This informal group within the campaign pushed at every turn to aggressively take on President Bush's greatest claim: his leadership on the war on terror.
It will be interesting to see how Clinton spins his influence on the campaign in the future, because apparently he also counciled Kerry to concentrate on domestic issues. For our gay friends on this site, I think Clinton's advice on the gay marriage issue is especially interesting. I think it puts to rest completely any thought of Clinton not being a rank political opportunist:
Behind the scenes, former President Clinton also kept up the drumbeat, telling Kerry in private conversations right to the end that he should focus on the economy rather than Iraq or the war on terror, and that he should come out in favor of all 11 state constitutional amendments banning gay marriage -- a move that would have been a political disaster for a candidate who had already been painted as an unprincipled flip-flopper. Sure, Kerry spoke about Iraq here and there until the end of the race (how could he not?), but the vast majority of what came out of the campaign, including Kerry's radio address 10 days before the election, was on domestic issues.
JamesB3 wrote a piece detailing why we should flush the past, and man did he hit it, especially in context of what we see from Ariannia's column. Talk about a group completely out of touch!!! Chee-rist They couldn't have been more clueless. One thing about the turds, even though none of them have anything in common with the people they profess to represent, they certainly know what they need to do to get their attention. The same can not be said for our "leaders."
Finally, this is a pretty long post, I thought, and I'm wondering why I keep getting this message on how I have to submit a diary entry that is at least 300 characters long? What the hell's up with that? I have to pass an IQ test and have the ability to write a PHD dissertation every time I want to post a diary? I know I've seen diaries that are not that long, recently.