Democrats 2004 - Worst Campaign in Presidential race history

[Birdseye]

You'd think the democratic challenger would have had an easy time this year vs. the 2000 election. We have a president who lost the popular vote but was still elected who has lost a net 1 million jobs (whether you think it was his fault or not, it hurts a candidate) while cutting taxes for the rich. He fought what now the majority of american people think is an unjust war. You'd think getting up on the stump and rallying the troops against him wouldn't be so difficult. It's almost an amazing feat of a blunder that Kerry isn't in the lead.

This is somewhat of a take-off from Herc's last post in the Thurlow thread, but it has gotten me thinking overall about Kerry's campaign.

Herc said:
"But, it is a FACT that the majority of Americans THINK that liberals are weaker on defense issues than conservatives. To counter that, the Kerry campaign strategically put forth his Viet Nam service as THE reason that the common perception should NOT apply to HIM. "

I think this is true, but it is a blunder. He ended up anti-Vietnam, which I knew before he even won the nomination was going to be used as a political tool against him. In an era of knee-jerk patriotism, putting a former anti war spokesman up for candidacy is political suicide, especially in a time where Bush's best numbers coincide with strong defense.

And like Drakona said in another thread, why didn't Kerry substanitively respond to Zell Miller's attack? I think everyone was struck by Miller's impassioned half truths, and it deserved a quick measured rebuttal; an instant counter press release and attack on Miller and Bush.


What's sad is that I think almost anyone else could beat Bush. Even though Dean is as close to a liberal whack job as the dems can get, I think even he would be doing better than Kerry (well, before the yelling incident). Take Gephardt, take anyone and I think they'd be doing better than Kerry.

Why not show an ad where bush publically reveals he doesn't understand what the word Sovereignty means?
http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl? ... /10/149259


The democrats campaign is outright pathetic. Kerry has to go on the attack. There's so much to attack bush on! I'd be shooting fish in a barrel. It would be very easy to find embarrassing quote after quote after tv clip. He needs to see F9-11, even though he claims he hasn't he already has taken a page from it in some of his speeches. Not the conspiritorial portions of it, but rather the clips about bush going on vacation way to much, bush reading my pet goat (well he's talked about it, but how about a TV attack ad), how about running the sovereignty clip, etc. I think he needs to take that genre of attack much further. There are so many extremely embarrassing Bush things to mention. Bush has already pulled out all the stops with SBV (I think it's clear that moveon.org is a lackey to Kerry, and SBV is a lackey to Rove/Bush) so it's Kerry's turn to fight back. At their convention they tried to mostly stray from focusing on attacking bush, which i think was the wrong thing to do. Most people that hate bush aren't a big Kerry fan, but are "voting for the douchebag anyway" I don't think that's going to change and Kerry needs to deal with the reality of that. Kerry needs to paint bush as a war-happy president that's going to get us into bad situations, much as the famous nuke commerical that defeated Barry Goldwater.

A majority of the public already believes the Iraq war was a mistake. Kerry screwed up big time when he said "knowing what we know now, I would have gone anyway." WTF?? He had his chance to distinguish himself and grab that base of people who really started to hate Bush because of the Iraq war. He's pushing away the independant voters like myself who were against the Iraq war. When Nader dissappeared off the ticket in my state, I gave Kerry a serious shot. He had his chance to say it was wrong and blame bush for the intelligence and captialize on "the buck stops here" and laud himself as the one to clean up the mess and get us out. Now many of the independents I think are going to vote third party, rather than for Kerry. His war policy is a shade of Bush's. He doesn't have the balls really to take a unique stance, and I think that's the defining charactaristic that is most lacking.

My mother doesn't pay attention to politics. She's mostly voted republican, but since she is a kindergarten teacher she sometimes votes democratic when she feels like the democrats are going to be better on education. She and my father both voted for Bush in 2000 (my dad has voted repub minus one perot vote since the 70s and already made up his mind against bush because he didn't think bush had an exit strategy for Iraq, or a good plan) but this year both are casting votes for Kerry--not that it'll matter in CA which Kerry will Carry anyway ;p

Anyway, point is that F911 is the best liberal anti bush thing that's affected people's perception of bush whether you think it's propaganda or gospel or somewhere in between, it worked. Bush's campaign has been filled with plenty of half truths and bad connect-the-dot games ala some of F911's, but it has been far more effective than anything the Kerry campaign has done. After seeing F911 my mom (who was anti Iraq war but pro gulf war but undecided about the election) said she couldn't vote for bush after seeing that, even if she didn't know how much of the movie was fact or fiction. The visual imagery worked.

Kerry appointed some new staff recently, so hopefully this will shake things up.

[Top Wop]

I was shocked to see Kerry win the nomination and thought he would be the last to be picked. But alas I was wrong. Then again he may be representative of the current Democratic party, which is sad.

[Avder]

Further proof of the weak campaign is the lack of kerry support in the kerry thread I started. I wasnt expecting too many real, substantive responces for that, but I was actually shocked to see the count at zero.

[Vander]

Any Democrat who was going to run this year was facing an uphill battle as was shown in 2000. The media savaged Gore. If anyone wants to debate that, meet me at the Motel 6 in Barstow tomorrow morning at 5am.

The RNC is just so much more adept than the DNC at putting out talking points. Their ability to create a talking point that is easily digestable is astounding. And their distribution network is awesome. From a simple "Economy WOW!" sign behind Bush as he speaks, to the army of good looking talking heads who all speak the same words. From their uncanny ability to use access as power, to their deaf ear when presented with unwelcome news. I truely believe that we're seeing something that we've never seen before. It's a media apparatus that is so successful, that it is changing how democracy works in America.

Now, I could probably go on and on about this, but I won't.

Now, the Democrats have known about all this for at least four years. You can see signs in them that they are changing for the times, but it really is falling short when matched against the RNC machine. Kerry's campaign has been pretty bad in their moves to counter the RNC machine. I have no response to that. I don't know why I know better talking points than the ones they put on TV after a speech to give a rebuttle. I can understand why they make certain moves, even when they turn out to be bad. There's at least some thinking behind it. But their inability to sufficiently flog the truth in the face of RNC misleading is pretty astounding to me. I think they believe that the truth is too complicated to fit in with what the RNC is putting out, so they try to play the RNC's game and simplify things. They get owned when they do this.

Supposedly there was a recent influx of old Clinton surrogates into the Kerry campaign. They were pretty effective, so maybe things will start looking up.

[Will Robinson]

Supposedly there was a recent influx of old Clinton surrogates into the Kerry campaign. They were pretty effective, so maybe things will start looking up.

"Looking up"..yea, looking up for Hillary in '08.

I think the reason she's not in it this year is it was uncertain if she could topple an incumbant war president so the shadow democrat party is sacrificing Kerry on her alter.
Those Clinton insurgents, Begala and Carville, are the 'Brutus Dagger' Kerry, watch your back!
Who do you think leaked the Clinton Kerry conversation last night?

[Avder]

I hope McCain runs in '08. I'd vote for him over just about any Democrat any day. Especially Hillary.

[Beowulf]

Hillary as president = ctrl+alt+delete on humanity.

[Ford Prefect]

I thought the Nixon VS McGovern 1968 was the worst Democratic campaign ever. Or are you just too young to remember that debacle.

[Testiculese]

Or, the party that controls both parties decided that Bush is making them a fortune, so they want to keep him a little longer.

[Top Gun]

I thought the Nixon VS McGovern 1968 was the worst Democratic campaign ever. Or are you just too young to remember that debacle.

I don't think most of us were born as of 1968 .

I'm for Bush in this election, so I do have some built-in bias here, but even from an unbiased standpoint, I completely agree with Birdseye. Kerry does not seem to be running an effective campaign up to this point. Just look at the respective responses from the conventions. Whereas Kerry's approval rating received little to no gain, Bush's went up by over 10%. Whether you attribute this to better salesmanship or genuine better policy, or some combination of the two, it's certainly an unusual statistic. I know it's way too early to call this race, and that this lead can evaporate in a day or two, but right now, Bush has the momentum. He's displaying more charisma and more self-certainty than Kerry is. I think that, if Kerry doesn't start to turn around soon, he's going to permanently put this election out of his reach.

[Testiculese]

I really don't think Kerry ever planned on winning. It's like watching the WWF or any 'reality show'. A whole lot of drama, and predetermined outcomes.

[Tman]

Birdseye, you are right on the money.

But I think the DNC has two problems, one of which you stated & I'll expand on and that is they have no talking points.

Heck, pick something and stand up for it. Take for example, education. I have a 4th & 5th grader and they are in classes of 32 & 31 kids. This is pathetic. Then you hear of Junior High kids where there are 50 kids in a class. We are not making an investment in our children, which is something we should never stop doing. Bushs' "left no child behind" law just added additional bureaucracy with no $$ behind it, so the schools need to do more with the same / less. Couple this with the fact that congress has ceded much of the financial burden to the states, and where does the govt get off on requiring additional criteria for which they won't fund?

The second problem with the DNC is they are always digging themselves out of a hole in responding to the Republican's outrageous statements. They have no "one-liners" that the republicans are so famous for.

Heck, even when a major gaffe is made, such as today when Cheney said

Cheney told Republican supporters at a town hall meeting in Des Moines that they needed to make "the right choice" in the November 2 election.

"If we make the wrong choice, then the danger is that we'll get hit again -- that we'll be hit in a way that will be devastating from the standpoint of the United States," Cheney said.

They let something like that sink in, then offer a "correct" statement such as

But Cheney's spokeswoman, Anne Womack, downplayed the line, saying it reflected "a difference in policy."

"This is nothing new. This is nothing inconsistent with his views," Womack said. "This is an overreaction to something we have used repeatedly and consistently. This is something that both the president and vice president have talked about consistently, the need to learn the lessons of 9/11. He was not connecting the dots."

Later, Womack commented further.

"The vice president stands by his quote in context," she said. "Whoever is elected in November faces the prospect of another terrorist attack. The question is whether or not we have the right policies in place to best protect our country. That's what the vice president said."

The DNC is spineless and has no rudder. If they don't pull their heads out of their ass*s quickly, it will be a Bush victory in 2004.

[Lothar]

A while back, I noted that the Democratic presidential hopefuls were really harping on the "Afghanistan / Iraq is a quagmire and we haven't captured Saddam or Osama" and "the economy sucks" points. Probably 80% of the campaigning I heard was about those two points. I posted here about that being a really stupid thing to harp on because by the time the actual presidential election rolled around both issues could radically change, and probably would. A while later, after Saddam was captured and the economy started looking up, I posted about it again -- and I noted that the Democratic candidates didn't really change their talking points much. It was stupid to harp on things that would change, and stupider to keep harping on the same things once they started to change. After Saddam's capture, it took quite a while for the "quagmire" point to fizzle out and the "misled into war" point to take center stage, and there's really no excuse for that.

All this is to say, it was obvious a long time ago that they'd run a pretty weak campaign. It was pretty obvious a long time ago that the Democratic candidates didn't know how to create good, solid talking points. And in order to defeat an incumbent -- especially one as polarizing as Bush, whose base will be out in force Nov 2 -- you need solid talking points, and you need to pound them home. You need to get people who are wavering to really believe in you. Kerry hasn't done that very well -- I think he believed he could win simply by not offending anybody. But he has to actually give people hope that he'll do a better job than Bush.

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Something else struck me during the RNC thread, when Birdseye commented that I already knew what Bush was going to say in his speech. I realized that he was right, from a policy standpoint -- I don't have to listen to Bush to know what policies he's putting forward. But when I listen to a candidate, his policies are only part of what I'm listening for. The other things I'm listening for are his character and what he values. Basically, I'm listening for him to give me some inkling of what he'd do in a situation he didn't expect beforehand, based on what kind of person he is and what his priorities are. That's more important to me than policy, because while I'm not really qualified to evaluate policy, I am qualified to say "this guy seems to care about the same things I do, so I expect his policies to reflect that" and I'm qualified to say "this guy seems to really stick to his guns, so I can expect him to really fight for the things he believes in." Even during the 2000 campaign, I had a strong impression that the things Bush really cared about are things I cared about and that he was the sort who'd act decisively. I think the whole nation saw that decisiveness 3 years ago when Bush responed to the 9/11 attacks, and we know he cares about spreading freedom and democracy from his acts since then. And what I was listening for in Bush's speech was a clearer idea of what he really cares about, which is what I got. So, for the most part, we all know Bush's major policies and we also know what Bush cares about. We all know Bush's character.

Now, Kerry has been somewhat shifty on policies -- it's hard to tell whether he wants to pull the troops out of Iraq next month, or by the end of 4 years, or what. It's hard to reconcile the statements he's made sometimes. But where he's really failed is in presenting what his priorities are and what kind of person he is -- he's really failed at presenting his character in a positive light. On policy he's been a little flaky, but in terms of priorities and character he's really been an enigma. He's had a long time to come out and say something like "my priorities are universal health care, an improved economy, and renewed alliances with other nations while we finish bringing democracy to Iraq." But he hasn't done that -- it's still not clear what his priorities are. He's had a long time to come out and demonstrate that he's consistant, honest, caring, etc. but he hasn't really done that either -- instead, he's put himself forward as "nuanced", as if that's the only worthwhile character trait for a person to have.

I was reading The Rockwood Comics Mailbag and the Sep. 03 response to "Robert" stated clearly why I care about character:

While we understand that you probably don't agree with our opinion on the war, we think you would admit that it does fit in with Bush's character. How a presidential candidate would handle issues that they've been drilled on for months (or years) in a campaign is one thing. But how a candidate would handle the unknown --like the war, for example-- is all based on character.

That's why I agree so strongly with the sentiment of Zell Miller's speech, even if the content is shaky. And that's why I care about Kerry's Vietnam service, the Swift Boat ads, the Senate testimony, and so on. Kerry's policies tell what he will do day-to-day, but Kerry's character tells me what he will do in a crisis. I have some problems with his policies, but those don't particularly worry me -- policies can be changed by the next president or by Congress. But what scares me is his character and his priorities -- what scares me is thinking of the way he'd respond in a crisis. Kerry has put forth an image of a guy who doesn't make national security a priority, and who doesn't take the threat of terrorism seriously, and who doesn't recognize that the Islamikazes have declared war on us, and who doesn't recognize the importance of alliances with countries like Pakistan and Turkey. I don't know what his priorities are, but I'm sure that national security and the WoT aren't them. And Kerry has put forth an image of a guy who wouldn't respond to a threat (say, Iran nearing completion of nuclear weapons) without the approval of France. I don't know what his character is, but the "bold and decisive" traits seem to have eluded him (would he really go against the UN, ever?) So has "responsibility" (as evidenced by his failure to apologize for OR stand behind his Senate testimony) and "good listening" (as evidenced by his claiming the RNC speakers kept questioning his patriotism and Vietnam service, when time and time again they'd actually expressed thanks for his patriotism and Vietnam service.)

That's why the "flip-flop" accusation sticks so readily to Kerry -- and it's what I've been saying about him for months now. It simply isn't clear what John Kerry cares about; it seems to change from speech to speech depending on the audience. I don't see any reason to think he'll actually make the war on terror a priority. I don't see any reason to think he really cares about national security. I don't see any reason to think he'd stick by a decision the UN didn't approve of. He can tell us that he wants to create universal health care, and he can tell us what Bush hasn't done -- but it seems more like a vote-grab than an issue he actually cares about.

So when we say the 2004 Democratic campaign has been pathetic, I think there's more to it than just a failure to put forth good talking points. I think the main failure has been the candidate himself. Along with having difficulty really making his policy ideas clear, Kerry has done a poor job of giving us any reason to trust him to make national security a priority. He's done a poor job of giving us any reason to trust him dealing with North Korea and Iran. He's done a poor job of letting us know what he really cares about, what he'd make a priority, and why we should trust him with the task of protecting us. Instead, we know he served in Vietnam. That should send him to a crushing defeat this November.

[kurupt]

from what i can tell it looks like kerry is just a little kid begging for some ice cream and when his mommy offers him carrots instead he says "but i have 3 purple hearts!!!!"

i first formed the opinion that kerry had no chance when i hadn't seen a single commercial for kerry that didn't completely revolve around his "war hero" image and his purple hearts. that seems to be the only real thing he is getting out to the masses. if kerry was really a war hero, we'd already know it.

i remember general schwartzkopff (sp?) but not kerry, so to me kerry must not have been enough of a war hero to warrant basing his entire campaign around it, but he's doing it anyway.