Talk Elections

When people look back on the 2004 election, what will they remember? How will peope sum it up?

Depends on how everything plays out.  If Bush's term becomes disastrous, history will judge the campaign as one where John Kerry had victory in his sights, then lost it due to poor judgement and negative attacks, a Dukakis-esque assesment except much more negative in their portrayal of Bush.

If Bush's term ends up succesful, the campaign will be viewed as the inevitable triumph of an incumbent war president who had the misfortune of a bad economy, and a series of bad months in Iraq which made the opponent competitive.

If, as is likely, it's a mixture of the two, I have no idea.

It will be viewed as yet another example of the fact that war-time incumbents can't be defeated.

That a lying, negative campaign re-elected the worst President ever.

You're probably right.  If Kerry ran a campaign with a more direct and positive message, he may have been able to win.

It shows how positively inept the Democrats become whenever they embrace their radical base too much. Bush could easily have been defeated, but no the Democrats had to put their moonbats in the forefront, and put John Kerry on the ticket (and make Howard Dean his big challenger)... even so, it was much closer then their earlier attempts (1972, 1984, 1988) - showing either that Bush really is a flawed president (my take) or that the lunatic left is becoming more popular (which would be scary).

Bush was actually pretty strong, he wouldn't have been easy to beat.  His approval ratings were about 52% on election day, which closely mirrored his share of the PV.  That's fairly close to what Clinton had in 1996, from what I can dig up, he was in the mid-50's.

What Bush had going against him, and what made it close, was that he was divisive.  The people who disapproved voted against him, those who voted with him approved.  There was little swing over the course of the campaign, and Kerry served as somewhat of a blank tablet as the opposing candidate.

If the 'lunatic left' had gotten their way, it would have been Howard Dean and not John Kerry.  Kerry won the nomination because, somehow, voters were stupid enough to believe that he, and not a midwestern populist like Gephardt or a good-looking southerner like Edwards was the strongest possible candidate.  Would Gephardt or Edwards have won?  Probably not, but you'd have seen the margins in Ohio and Missouri cut in half as the opposition candidate was somebody who could relate to the people suffering through economic problems.  Kerry couldn't relate to these people, so they ended up voting down cultural issue lines and supporting Bush.

I think it will be remembered as the Democrats running a top to bottom campaign, trying to win with what they were instead of actually changing to try to win. The big weapons were Michael Moore, R.E.M, Bruce Springsteen, and The New York Times, but they were trying to win Ohio. We had the money, but we didn't use it well. It was a high-powered attack that seemed to lack finesse.

From a purely partisan view, I'm sort of viewing it now as "How the hell did we let Bush win when his message was 'You may not like where I stand, but at least you know where I stand.'