I'm sorry, but they really did turn their backs on thousands of people who worked their ass off to support their campaign, not to mention the millions of us who thought that looking into incidents/results in Ohio was necessary.
Some comments, and pieces of a Nov. 20 article:
http://www.nyobserver.com/pages/story.asp?ID=98792:30 a.m. Eastern standard time November 3 in Copley Square in Boston, Massachusetts, where Kerry's supporters were gathered and vowed to hold out for a full count in Ohio:
Edwards declared, "It's been a long time, but we've waited four years for this victory. We can wait one more night." He continued, "John Kerry and I made a promise to the American people that in this election every vote would count and every vote would be counted. Tonight we are keeping our word and we will fight for every vote. You deserve no less."
John Kerry turned tail and ran out on his supporters in order to preserve his "image" in that fateful morning-after concession speech. In order to avoid looking like a "sore loser"—the phony chivalric gesture that, in fact, is designed to enhance his own image, not address his voters’ concerns. In order to avoid looking like Al Gore. For the sake of history, for the sake of maximum clarity and rationality in our political culture, we deserve the most exacting count possible, even if that means (horror of horrors) litigation.
Why wouldn’t John Kerry allow the votes to be (re)counted? Why the pre-emptive concession? (Which has no legal force: He has to be President if an Ohio recount goes his way.) Why deny his supporters the certainty that the votes had been counted and counted fairly? Why did Mr. Kerry’s nerve fail him? Why do yet another flip-flop and repudiate the words of John Edwards about making sure every vote is counted?
In Ohio, where a switch of some 68,000 votes could have changed the name of the next President, the count deserved maximum scrutiny. This point becomes clearer every day.
Mr. Kerry’s failure to aggressively pursue the counting and recounting at the outset—that morning, when the evidence was fresh on the ground—has made it virtually impossible to know the vote with the exactitude we deserve. Especially if the Democratic Party is going to change its principles on the basis of 68,000 votes in Ohio.
Mr. Kerry, for instance—if he were smart, if he were truly forward-thinking and unselfish—could have changed what is now becoming the Master Narrative of the Election (a "mandate" based on "values" means: get pious or else). If he had made the speech I suggest (or some version of it), he could have changed the focus from Mr. Bush’s popular-vote win (only 51 percent anyway) to a narrative about the unresolved closeness of the margin. About how the country remains divided—at least electorally—rather than the false (based on misread, inaccurate exit polls) triumph of righteousness (and self-righteousness).
The Democratic Party would be exposing the scandal of the failure to reform our voting procedures to affirm fairness (no more four-hour lines in minority urban precincts, as in Ohio, and similar abuses) rather than getting its collective knickers in a twist over how to appease the intrusive, self-proclaimed moralists by discarding its principles.
Instead the brainwashing began immediately:
NEWSWEEK: "Nothing but a miracle could save Kerry, and the candidate and his advisers saw that the long wait and inevitable court fights would paint Kerry as a sore loser. Advisor Ron Klain presented an aggressive legal strategy, but Kerry decided to spare the country."
Then of course the AP and many others magically disproved the "conspiracy theories" without really even discussing them in detail.
He made it all about him. All about how he’d look, about his image, perhaps about his future, his pathetic dream of running another inept campaign. What about his followers, who put their hearts into the campaign and were cheated of certainty so Mr. Kerry could bask in the goo-goo congratulations of the sappy and wrong-headed "spare the country" editorialists.
But in fact, he hasn’t spared the country anything. And note that not everyone thought "nothing but a miracle" could have made a difference in Ohio. Advisor Ron Klain obviously didn’t, and there’s a bit of imprecision in Newsweek’s account of the Klain/Kerry conflict. Newsweek’s own voice seems to accept unquestioningly the judgment of one Kerry faction that "Nothing but a miracle could save Kerry," although clearly there was at least one person in the Kerry camp who disagreed, and we don’t hear anything about his reasoning.
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