This is not a Kerry apology. This is a guy who never thought Kerry should have been our candidate in the first place saying I don't blame him for the loss. I've come to respect the man, and there were times when he did do us proud. I think he fought pretty much the best campaign he was capable of fighting. I'm even inclined to forgive him the disastrous statement on how he would support Bush's authorization to go to war again (given the inexcusable vote itself, and the fact that it doesn't really look so hot on a presidential candidate to say I made a mistake to trust this man). No, the blame lies entirely with the people who made JK's candidacy - the primary voters and the party big wigs who promoted him. My sense is that most Kossacks know this. But a reminder might help in these confusing days. Reminder below the fold, followed up with a brief look ahead.
(First things first - yeah, they're still counting, and I darn well want them to count and recount every vote. But we lost anyway. The Bush presidency is a horrible failure, and dems weren't holding any branch of power on the federal level, so no-one could blame us. We should've won in a landslide.)
Why was John Kerry the wrong choice of nominee? Trying to avoid the clichés:
* Because he is impossible to identify with. His biography might have inspired in the 60s and 70s, but in 2004 it is probably all but incomprehensible to anyone significantly under 50. We needed to go see Going Upriver to help us try and understand who this man is - a hopeless sell in any modern campaign. Few people are inspired by imagining the life he leads; few people have gone to the trouble of decoding the choices he has made.
* Because he didn't have a message (only a dozen or so slogans). At least as importantly, because he didn't offer a new vision or perspective or new policy proposals. (The last guy to win a presidential election without a new approach was GHWB - he ran against an opponent who didn't have a new approach either.) He was never going to be perceived as the man of the future. He would have been an appealing candidate in the 1970s - after 1980, his time had come and gone. He ran for the reason that Bob Dole ran - because he believed it was his turn. Not nearly good enough.
Why, then, did John Kerry become the nominee? Again, trying to avoid the clichés:
*From the point of view of the party establishment: because he wasn't Howard Dean.
*From the point of view of the primary voters: because they figured his standing as a war hero was the best dems could do on 9/11 - basically, their best inoculation against the "weak on national security" charge. And, because they perceived him as a tough SOB, a guy who had the nerve, the guts, and the instincts to take on the Rove machine. (On this, they were largely right. Rove didn't succeed in destroying Kerry. Independents and undecideds did break for Kerry on election day - just not by a wide enough margin to offset the march of the Christian Soldiers. Had Kerry been a tough cookie and inspiring, he'd have won.)
Lessons learned:
* Many people are walking away from this convinced that only southern moderates can win national elections these days. That's the wrong conclusion - but the perception will make it even harder for anybody who isn't a southern Baptist to succeed. Don't get me wrong - I'd love to stand with a populist from the south. It's just that they don't seem to make `em with a spine anymore down there these days. (Red staters please forgive me - many of the most tenacious liberals/progressives in the country are red staters - I'm just talking about the "leaders" the south has produced since Clinton.) And, yes, we do need to have a big tent, and we do need a candidate who can talk religion unabashedly and has the appropriate bible quote right at their finger tips no matter what the question. But that alone won't do.
* We need to stop choosing our candidates solely on the basis of who best deflects the charges of the right. This time it was "Let's give `em a war hero, so they can't claim we're weak on national security", next time it'll be "Let's give `em a southern Baptist, so they can't claim we're weak on values." It's the strategy of the least offensive candidate. But voters are looking for reasons to vote for a candidate, not just for an absence of reasons to vote against him or her.
* The party establishment is a big part of the problem. I don't blame them for the McGovern/Mondale trauma. I have that trauma myself. The trouble is, if you truly believe in your candidate and your platform, you're prepared to go down fighting for it. If you communicate to the electorate that you're not prepared to loose an election over your beliefs, they'll conclude that your beliefs just aren't strong enough - that you'll say whatever it takes to get elected.
* Never again can we allow ourselves or our candidates to run a national election campaign without a brand new platform chockfull of brand new policy proposals, with a grand overarching theme that presents a coherent new vision for the country. I view the Kerry campaign as an experiment. The question was, can special circumstances such as Iraq and the war on terrorism render a candidate who otherwise is yesterday's papers competitive if he looks strong on those special issues? It's obvious to me that the question has been answered decisively.
