A great point of view by Democratic strategist John Belasarius. My take is that, yes, there
were some major mistakes in the campaign, but no campaign is perfect. There's no reason to think any other candidate wouldn't have made any mistakes, and in any event the campaign's mistakes were matched by Bush disasters (the debates) and the news cycle. In the end, it was tied and we lost on turnout. Clearly, there are things that need to be done, but I think we also have to stop for a second and consider the good things that Kerry and Edwards did in this campaign.
This post from emergingdemocraticmajority.com sums it up perfectly:
http://www.emergingdemocraticmajorityweblog.com/donkeyrising/archives/000926.phpNo, it’s not just that Dems came within 3% of winning a very tough election. That alone is a very real and important accomplishment, but it’s not the key.
The real point is that if the Democrats are serious about the long-tem goal of building a broad and enduring democratic majority then getting 51% of the vote is not always the right test of a particular campaign’s success. Sometimes you have to lose an election to build the foundation for later victory.
<snip>
Last December, the Democratic party was internally divided, unsure about its message, uncertain how to talk about war and foreign affairs, financially dependent on donations from corporations and affluent donors and only beginning to build a grass-roots voter mobilization campaign. There was great anger and energy among the party’s core supporters, but it seemed extremely unlikely that the party as a whole would be able to agree upon a message, unite around a candidate and mount a serious challenge to a personally popular wartime president whose approval ratings hovered close to 60%.
<snip>
Kerry and Edwards then provided the Democratic Party with a politically viable moderate-progressive message - one that had been eluding the party for years. In foreign affairs it combined basic patriotism and support for the troops with brutally sharp and honest criticism of the Administration’s disastrous foreign policy. In domestic affairs, it combined a cautious but sincere economic populism with greater fiscal responsibility then the Republican administration.
<snip>
The truth is that in presidential elections the Democrats have basically been a minority party since 1968, when George Wallace cut deeply into the Dems blue-collar support in Michigan and the other industrial states as well as the South. In 1972, when the Republicans played the “Real Majority” vs. the “Elitists” game against the Dems for the first time, Nixon got 60% of the vote to McGovern’s 37%. Carter won a narrow victory in 1976 but look at the record since then.
1980 Jimmy Carter 41% vs. Reagan+Anderson 57%
1984 Walter Mondale 41% vs. Reagan 59%
1988 Michael Dukakis 46% vs. Bush Sr. 53%
1992 Bill Clinton 43% vs Bush+Perot 56%
Democrats never got anywhere even close to 50% of the vote until Clinton’s reelection campaign in 1996 (Clinton 49%, Dole/Perot 49%) and Gore’s 2000 run (Gore 48%, Bush 48%).
But in both of these latter campaigns the Democrats were running as incumbents or former Vice-Presidents, not as challengers. 2004 was the first time a Democrat ran as a challenger in more then a decade and Kerry faced a President who had, at the outset, high approval ratings, the patriotic fervor of an apparently successful war behind him, the overt support of one of the major TV networks, and the most extensive grass-roots voter mobilization the Republican Party had ever fielded.
And yet Kerry and Edwards came closer to unseating their opponent and closer to winning 50% of the vote then had any Democratic challengers in the last three decades.
<snip>
The Dems lost an election. OK, it happens.
But the Dems haven’t been defeated, not at all.
They’ve just been slowed down.
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