If you were John Kerry's campaign manager what would you have done different?

[dazzleman]

I would have picked a VP candidate from either the midwest or southwest.  Those were areas where Kerry was competitive, while the south was not.

In picking the Breck Girl as his VP candidate, Kerry gambled everything on at least cracking the south, and he lost.

In terms of substance, Edwards added absolutely nothing to the ticket, plus he was no help to Kerry in the south, not even his home state.  Picking Edwards was clearly a major mistake.

There were others of course, but many consisted of political baggage predating the campaign that made it harder for Kerry to take the positions he needed to win without be a flip-flopper.  His patrician Massachusetts background was also a liability about which nothing could be done.

I would not have wanted to be John Kerry's campaign manager.

[dazzleman]

Nobody can hope to win without a positive message.  Kerry really didn't offer one.  His message was simply that he was not George W. Bush.

Kerry was severely handicapped by having to rely on a very dovish base in a time of war.  This caused him no end of problems, and I don't know how he could have gotten around it.

[dazzleman]

Nobody can hope to win without a positive message.  Kerry really didn't offer one.  His message was simply that he was not George W. Bush.

Kerry was severely handicapped by having to rely on a very dovish base in a time of war.  This caused him no end of problems, and I don't know how he could have gotten around it.

Umm, if you went to the Kerry website, you could learn all about Kerry. If you went to the Bush website, you could also learn all about Kerry. Suppose you wanted to know about the guy who had been President for the last 4 years? Tough luck. See a problem?

But very few voters go to the candidate's website.  He didn't articulate a positive message.  I'm not a big Kerry basher, so I'm not saying this to be disagreeable, but he seemed the think that not being Bush was enough.

Only under the most extraordinary circumstance can a person be elected president without a positive message that resonates with the public.

[dazzleman]

RJ, you also have to realize that not as many people hated Bush as you thought.  Bush haters are very vocal, but much of their venom turned voters off, and pushed them into voting for Bush. 

There are also a good number of people who like Bush.  I learned a long time ago, if you want to predict the outcome of an election, you must go well outside your zone of comfort in asking people with many different opinions.  For example, I thought Bloomberg would win the NYC mayor election because a staunch Democrat who worked with me told me he was voting for Bloomberg.  To me that was an indicator that Bloomberg was connecting with a certain demographic that he needed to win, and that his opponent was turning off that demographic.  If I only talked to my friends and the people I associate with on a regular basis about the election, I would have expected Bush to win about 75% of the vote.

Hollywood was especially effective in bringing about the outcome it wanted least -- a Bush re-election.  Many Americans hold Hollywood in contempt to begin with, and when they all started dumping on Bush in a vicious way, many people, some of whom were probably not crazy about Bush, said, "if THOSE people really hate Bush, he must be OK," or alternatively, "if those people are so vociferously for Kerry, maybe we should reconsider."

Only under the most extraordinary circumstances can a candidate, especially a challenger to an incumbent president, win without a positive message.  A popular incumbent like Reagan can win with a "morning in America, four more years" type theme, but a challenger has to give voters a solid reason to turn out the incumbent, unless he is just so hated that a majority just want him out.  In some circles, Bush was hated like that, but clearly those people weren't a majority.

I think of the 1988 election as an exception.  George H.W. Bush ran an almost completely negative campaign and won.  Of course, he was a quasi-incumbent, understudy to a very popular incumbent who couldn't run.  And Dukakis was a numbskull.  But even so, I always thought that Bush's failure to lay out a goal or a program hobbled his presidency from the start, and led to a lot of the problems that he had during his term, culminating in his defeat for re-election.

[dazzleman]

Have him back off of abortion entirely.

P.S.: Kerry won PA by 2.5% exactly.

Or maybe he should have refrained from gratuitously mentioning Mary Cheney's lesbianism during the debate.  He was trying to send a signal to vociferous gay rights groups who hate Mary Cheney because she hasn't condemned her father's politics, but I think it backfired.

[dazzleman]

Have him back off of abortion entirely.

P.S.: Kerry won PA by 2.5% exactly.

Or maybe he should have refrained from gratuitously mentioning Mary Cheney's lesbianism during the debate.  He was trying to send a signal to vociferous gay rights groups who hate Mary Cheney because she hasn't condemned her father's politics, but I think it backfired.

I always figured he was trying to do the opposite, and hope that the GOP base would sour on Bush/Cheney since Cheney hasn't condemned his daughter for her homosexuality. But yeah, in any event it was a stupid and not so nice thing to do; someone's personal history in that area should have no relevance on a Presidential campaign. Unfortunately both sides tend to revert to that kind of mudslinging in every election campaign.

If that's true, then he seriously misjudged the GOP people.  Few people, including the most conservative evangelical Christians, would expect a father to condemn his daughter in that manner.  The issue is much more about public policy toward gay marriage than it is about behavior within families.

What Kerry said was totally ridiculous on many fronts.  We really can't say that homosexuality is innate, as he suggested.  It may be, at least in some people.  It can also be a reaction to environmental factors.  Or some combination of the two.

Kerry was simply blindly asserting the doctrinaire gay rights movement dogma about homosexuality.  And I stand by my original analysis, that he was sending a signal of support to nasty gay rights groups by going after Mary Cheney.  I think you're right also about what Kerry hoped to do, but that was not in conflict with what I said, but additive to it.

[dazzleman]

What I mean is, Edwards was not popular in NC - he was good at connecting with people one on one. But Bayh might have made IN competitive for the first time since the Johnson landslide or Perot sucking away the conservative vote in 92 and 96.

Edwards is a better campaigner.... but his dowry so to speak is not as useful. Bayh would bring a fatter cow? Probably would have helped with OH also.

Edwards is a shallow phony.  The nickname "the Breck girl" suits him perfectly.

Kerry had to make a choice between trying to crack the south, or going after the midwest, or possibly the southwest.

He decided that if he could only crack the south, the rest would fall into place.  It would have worked had he been successful at it.  But he should have realized that it probably wouldn't work, since that was the area where Bush was least vulnerable.  He had a much better shot I think of capturing a couple more states in the midwest, or in the southwest, that would have put him over the top.