Mary Beth Cahill is the reason Kerry lost

[TrueAmerican]

She didn't want to address the swift boat liars.

She should never run a campaign again.

[soothsayer]

1. McAulliffe is 0 for 8

[TrueAmerican]

3. I'm not happy with McAuliffe etiher

But, Mary Beth Cahill was incompetent.

[MemphisTiger]

22. I agree...We need a change in leadership at the DNC

You can blame kerry and a host of others. The bottom line is that they are the folks in charge of the direction of the party, and they failed. The buck stops with them. We need to take our party back.

[Royal Observer]

38. I nominate

Bill Richardson to lead the DNC.

[molly]

2. Stop it already - the reason is FRAUD!

[bushisanidiot]

8. Exactly! Now is not the time to eat our own. We need to stand by

eachother until this is over.. then we can re-evaluate "why" it happened.

the counting is still going on, so we need to be patient until it has ended and has been finalized.

[tngledwebb]

10. Right.

It's down to ONE reason ONLY. The PERFECT campaign with the PERFECT candidate would STILL HAVE LOST.

[Name removed]

28. Deleted message

Message removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

[SOS]

29. Read this article

and you may reconsider:
http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20040816&s=dugger

[DenaliDemocrat]

32. Fraud or no fraud

Bush has been so screwed up this last four years it should not have even been a contest. We were too passive.

[jdj]

4. she only had one vote.

[WildClarySage]

17. If that.

depends on where she voted...

[SoCalDem]

5. and she should take her pal, shrum with her

I'm not saying that we should emulate the repubes, but they DO have a real TV-savvy, that we have not figured out..

Our spokespeople , for the most part, are a pretty anemic, geeky bunch..

I'm not saying that we need Ken and Barbies like they have tons of, but Good Grief.. we could at least get somer people who have TV presence, and can battle on equal footing with the drones...


Personally, I wish that for the next 2 years, we would just plain AVOID having ANY dems appear on the talking head shows.. Give the media what they seem to want..all-repub-rightwingers-all-the time.. Let people have their FILL of the whole wretched bunch..

JUST SAY NO... Why have anyone go on, just to be "alan Colmes"??

None of them will get a fair go at it..

[The Backlash Cometh]

18. SoCalDem

Meanwhile, why not start organizing in the background? I wouldn't have known that you have local Dem chapters across this country by what I've seen. I've asked if there was a local chapter of the Dems in my area over a year ago, but the lukewarm comments I received was all I needed to back out. SoCal, you and I are the same kind of people. The question I have is, how would we feel with Dem groups who we feel we have nothing in commmon with.

We have to have more than just shared political values. The Dems need to start networking to create a civic styled organization that keeps you in continual touch with people. A social center. I just e-mailed someone who asked me what I thought about revolutionizing religion. The key is, that you can't go ask for someone's vote and volunteer work in the last months of an election. You must already have established a relationship with that person if you really want a loyal voter.

[BlueInRed]

34. Amen about Shrum

please don't let the guy advise anymore Democratic campaigns

[Sperk]

6. One Reason ONLY that Kerry "lost"....Dems refuse to get verified votes!

Picture Soros as CEO of diebold and Dems fighting a paper trail in courthouses around the country. And on top of that, Diebold collects the votes to count them...I challenge ANYONE to say they believe the Repugs would have tolerated that! That is the one good thing I have to say about Repugs....THEY ARE NOT AFRAID TO FIGHT!!!!!!

[tngledwebb]

Really? Hard to say,

but you must be leaving out the chicken hawks.

[Sperk]

15. sorry, excluding Physical fighting......but they'll call a spade a spade

hell, they'll call a diamond a spade if they have to.

[BJ]

7. Now, come on..................

Every time a Democrat loses we start looking for a scapegoat. Why don't the Democrats start looking at what went right?

The incumbent only won by 3, well maybe it's 5 by now, million votes.

Bill Clinton beat Bob Dole by 8 million votes in 1996 yet got only 47% of the total ballots cast!

I don't have any answers yet but they're out there.

[blm]

9. Can you tell me how much any other Democratic campaign would have won by?

The only way to win is to own the machines that do the vote counting.

The exit polls were right. Kerry won. The machines will ALWAYS say Bush won, even if we ran Bill Clinton again.

[never_get_over_it]

11. And you know that woman that got raped last night

out there is America somewhere - she got raped because her skirt was too short

STOP BLAMING THE VICTIM

More people voted for Kerry

Can't you see THEY WANT US TO BELIVE all these idiot reasons Kerry lost - HE DID NOT - STOP IT

[robbedvoter]

12. Kerry won - it was stolen. He refused to champion the issue.

kerry is a loser just because of it. He could have become a leader - NOW! But he didn't have it in him - back to career politics - or, wait - he never left that.

[Nightwing]

13. This election was rigged from the start

I do not personally blame Mary Beth Cahill, although I do agree that Kerry should have addressed the Swift Boat Liars much sooner than he did.

What I feel in my gut, especially having worked at the grass root level in Ohio, this is another stolen election which was already in place BEFORE the Dem nominee was decided. Every single poll we did matched CNN's earlier data that Kerry was well ahead in Ohio. The only logical answer as to what happened here is that Ken Blackwell and Diebold had the deck stacked against Kerry before any vote was cast.

[JM]

14. Bullshit...

We lost because we do not have a system in place. We do not have a system that trains and assists low-level candidates to enter the political arena. We don't have a system in place that allows those low-level candidates to move up from the municipalities into the counties and state legislatures and governorships. This is where the laws are made and the tone is set.

The Dems gutted a system that was in place, a system that had boot camps to train campaign staff and work with beginning candidates.

The party needs to be fixed. It is not one person.

We lost because the Republicans realized 36 years ago they could not run the top candidate in the top position and hold on to power over the long haul without control of the lower echelons of government. They figured out that they need people to run for dog-catcher and town manager to eventually hold on to power over time when those people moved up in the chain of command.

You don't win a war with one general and no troops. You win it with several generals and thousands of troops.

JM

[kodi]

19. you are exactly right.

i submitted an article to DU yesterday that states almost verbatim what you said.......

"In the late 1970’s there appeared a noticeable movement by the corporate, cultural, and religious Right to gain control of local political organizations. Their purpose was manifold, first to organize a political party (within a party, the GOP), second to use this party to spearhead their agendas. They were smarter than the progressives who thought that cultural and political changes could be forced from the top down, and it is to our everlasting shame that we progressives thought that all we had to do was win a SCOTUS case to end racism, poverty, hunger, and intolerance. We progressives got soft and thought we had won the battle of the hearts and minds of the American people by judicial fiat.

"The Right knew better, set to work and organized. They knew that all politics was local, that US senators come from US congressmen that congressmen came from state government legislatures and these came from local political organizations. So they took to building their base at the lowest levels of collective actions. Whether it was the local school board, the county health board, the local zoning board, county district attorneys, county commissioners, and mayors, etc., all of these became the battleground for the religious and secular Right.

"They have succeeded beyond their wildest dreams. What stands before us now is a cadre of well trained, well funded Rightwing conservatives who are placed throughout the breadth and width of the political landscape and exert influence at each choke point for progressive causes."

we are going to have to take a page from the GOP playbook.

[Democat]

37. Good points

Both of you.

[tngledwebb]

21. No, not BS. Or are you saying

Republicans are actually smarter, more savvy, more skilled than Dems?

Or do you mean they are better funded, with years of control over corporate media?

If the former, can't tell this by how they've ruined the economy or run the war in Iraq, or by personal observation.

If the latter, well...you're getting warm.

[JM]

26. What I am saying is...

...no one person in the Democratic Party is responsible for what happened this week. To hold one person responsible over one issue is what is BS.

This week was the result of very hard work on the part of some very savvy Republicans over 36 years, and serious oversight on the part of Democrats for the same amount of time.

JM

[tngledwebb]

27. Agree with first sentence.

And in some ways with the second.

But the reason we lost this one was because the Repugs knew we would win it, just like last time.

And they had four years and some heavy media allies to sort out the bugs and quell the questions.

Real democrats and real Dems don't work that way.

[Qutzupalotl]

39. We have a system in place.

We do not have a system that trains and assists low-level candidates to enter the political arena.

Yes, we do. Look here:
http://www.democracyforamerica.com/trainings/
Democracy for America has a partnership with 21st Century Democrats to provide trainings for grassroots leaders.

[mapatriot]

16. Cahill was superb

Mary Beth Cahill is one of the smartest, savvy campaign architects in the world. She believes in integrity and hard work. I worked with her on a Senate campaign and she was a tireless, creative and strongly competitive leader.

If you mean that she wouldn't bring the campaign to the gutter level of a Rove, well then, so be it. I'd rather lose than compromise our integrity to that degree.

Let's learn how to win with people like Mary Beth, not resort to hiring the Atwater's and Rove's of the world.

[The Backlash Cometh]

20. I respect Mary Beth...

but not addressing an attack promptly has always been a mistake. It hurt Dukakis. That said, I still can't get over the fact that 94,000,000 plus people came out to vote for Kerry. Wow!

If you were hurt, you were hurt because Rove was succesful in drumming up votes in the churches.

[rabid_nerd]

23. I wouldn't say it's her fault

but she SUCKED as a spokesperson.

[Maat]

24. Ah-hem.

We lost because our views are in the minority. The majority is a bunch of ill-informed, uneducated bigots. I have to accept that. Talk to my neighbor, and you will see that.

[Dinger]

25. I Thought..

like Al Gore, Kerry's campaign waited too long to respond to attacks. Nice doesn't cut it.

[laundry_queen]

31. Exactly...

You wait too long to respond and it looks contrived and fake. The attack sticks in peoples mind (because the media will replay it ad nauseum until a response) and the response fades into oblivion.
That said, doesn't matter what Dems do, if the voter fraud isn't fixed, we'll never win.

l_q

[grasswire]

30. I don't want a nice lady as campaign manager again

Donna Brazile is a nice lady, too.

I want a baracuda of a strategist.

[CityDem]

33. Mary Beth Cahill is an incompetent hack

She was slow to responding to the SBV's and was terrible when appearing on network/cable shows. She should find a job cleaning toilets at a Holiday Inn somewhere in Vermont.

[mccormack98]

35. WRONG! Dems will lose each election if they don't figure this one out.

It's the media, stupid. Gore gets it. That's why he is starting his own network.

Do you really think that it was the Kerry campaign's fault that they didn't play the Swiftboat lie properly? Or do you think maybe the media could have factchecked the Swifties before deciding whether they deserved air time?

[molly]

36. THIS is the reason we "lost"

I posted it yesterday

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=203&topic_id=21305&mesg_id=21305