I'm not sure I agree... I think Gephardt lost out because of nothing
short of a lack of charisma. I don't think people were paying that much
attention to positions or character during the primaries, and there were
way too many people on the list to go very deep. But if he wasn't
charismatic enough to beat Kerry on the Primaries, I'm not sure he would
have had what it took to beat Bush either. After all, Gore lost on
charisma too.

I think where Kerry blew it worst is that he never really recovered from
the whole "flip-flop" persona. He had opportunities to. But basically,
his only comeback was to say that he misspoke when he talked about
"voting for it before voting against it." From a public perception, he
was saying that he made a mistake by poorly describing his flip-flopping,
but never actually addressed the issue of flip-flopping itself.

He didn't focus (as I think he should have) on the reality that
sometimes it is better to change your opinion in light of new facts than
to hold firm to a lie. He could have very easily turned the whole thing
around and put Bush in a defensive position - either the President of the
United States had the wool pulled over his eyes by his own intelligence
agency and is incompetent, or he had hidden motives and went into Iraq
based on a lie and pulled the wool over the eyes of the American people
and is undeserving. Instead, he left his own trustworthiness unaddressed,
and the public just didn't trust him. It didn't help, either, that he
constantly spoke about how he had a "better plan" for Iraq, but never
really qualified that with what the plan was... Basically it left his
credibility completely in question.

Either way, I think this is a much more serious issue than stem cell
research, or Gay Marraige. I strongly suspect that what the news media is
labelling "Moral Values" is not about the latter issues nearly as much as
about just general credibility. I guess liberals like me prefer to give
Kerry a chance, rather than let Bush go on pulling the wool over our eyes
(or allowing it to be pulled over our eyes by his staff). Where
conservatives would rather have someone they are comfortable with in
office than give the new, unpredictable guy a chance, especially if he
has shown he might not be perfect either.


No, I think the biggest problem in this election was simply that there
was not much difference at all between the two candidates, or if there
was, it was so clouded by nonessential issues that the general public was
left to vote on whether they are more comfortable with or without change,
and not much else.


"Jay Honeck" wrote in
news:k_bid.351511$MQ5.252777@attbi_s52:

These people are mad Kerry didn't run a liberal campaign and can't
stand that he "was just as pro-war as Bush."

That is SO ironic.

If the Democrats has nominated a middle-of-the-road guy to run against
Bush -- say, Dick Gephardt -- this election would not have even been
close. The Democrats would have swept the nation, and never by less
than 25 percentage points.

Stupidly, they nominated a guy whose political positions were to the
left of Ted Kennedy's, absolutely ensuring a Bush victory.

There were many traditional Republicans out here -- myself included --
who would have voted for a conservative Democrat in this election. But
there was just no way for any of us to vote for a guy like Kerry.

The moral for the Democrats: Don't ever nominate an ultra liberal to
run for president again.