Hindsight Is 20/80

Arianna Huffington writes at AlterNet, today:

Twelve days before the election, James Carville stood in a Beverly Hills living room surrounded by two generations of Hollywood stars. After being introduced by Sen. John Kerry's daughter, Alexandra, he told the room — confidently, almost cockily — that the election was in the bag.

"If we can't win this damn election," the advisor to the Kerry campaign said, "with a Democratic Party more unified than ever before, with us having raised as much money as the Republicans, with 55 percent of the country believing we're heading in the wrong direction, with our candidate having won all three debates, and with our side being more passionate about the outcome than theirs — if we can't win this one, then we can't win sh*t! And we need to completely rethink the Democratic Party."

Well, as it turns out, that's exactly what should be done. But instead, Carville and his fellow architects of the Democratic defeat have spent the last week defending their campaign strategy, culminating on Monday morning with a breakfast for an elite core of Washington reporters....

And Ryan Lizza writes at TNR, posted yesterday (brackets in original):

Last Saturday night at H₂O, a waterfront nightclub in southwest Washington, the Kerry campaign assembled for a final evening of drinking. To everyone's surprise, John Kerry himself flew down from Boston to attend the festivities. Trying to buck up his demoralized troops, the ex-candidate gave a short speech about how much his team had accomplished. "People are going to try to rewrite history and say we didn't have a message in this campaign," Kerry told his staff, according to one Democratic strategist. "And, let me tell you, the message never changed. The message we had in the final days of the campaign was the same as the one we had in the primaries." That was news to some of the boozy Kerry revelers. "Everyone in that room was on edge because everyone wanted to know: What was that message?" says the strategist.

It's that time again for Democrats. Kerry aides and party strategists have thrown themselves into their quadrennial post-campaign ritual of recriminations. Old scabs are being picked. Scores are being settled. Clintonites point fingers at the Kennedy wing. Longtime Kerry aides throw accusations of disloyalty at the Clintonites. Staffers from the Democratic National Committee lob bombs at staffers from the campaign. Policy wonks gripe about inept political consultants. Kerry aides who traveled on the campaign plane snipe at the aides who were based in Washington. Democrats, out of power and out of jobs, are doing what they do best: turning on one another.

The largest caucus of recriminators, one that spans ideological boundaries and includes critics from every corner of the party, argues that Kerry failed to offer a compelling message. As Kerry seemed to realize in his speech Saturday night, the no-message critique is congealing into conventional wisdom. I heard it in every conceivable permutation from almost everyone I interviewed. "I don't know that we ever knew what it was we were saying about George W. Bush," says one senior member of the team, whose job it was to come up with a message about Bush. It was a problem that plagued the campaign as soon as they stumbled, penniless, from the primaries into the general election. "When we got into the general, nobody knew how to go against Bush," says a senior campaign official. "[Senior adviser Bob] Shrum and [pollster Mark] Mellman built this strategy against Bush, 'Stronger at home, respected in the world.' What does that mean? We never even had strategy memos." By the fall, things were no better. "If there was a clear message in September about why you elect Kerry and defeat Bush, most of the people in the campaign were unaware of it," says one senior strategist hired late in the campaign....

(Thanks, James.)

For an indicator of just how bad a candidate John Forbes Kerry was, see this for a reminder (or, if you haven't seen it before, a clue) about how much top-flight insider help he got from comrades in mainstream media from the start — and still managed to screw things up, day by day, week by week, month by month. As I wrote back in July, before the DNC convention:

.... Yes, I think Kedwards is already past the Point of No Return: the nation greeted the new Kerry-Edwards team — last week? the week before? who knows? who cares? — with a gigantic yawn. Even the Democratic Establishment — professional politicians & mainstream media — can hardly hide that they are pretending to be excited, if they are even bothering to pretend.

It's all over but the shouting. Of which there will probably be a lot next week. After that, a long, slow slide into home plate, where the umpire will whip his arm into the air, his thumb pointing back over his shoulder.

By then, even the runner will know he's been out by a mile.

Surely, you didn't think that I didn't know what I was talking about — did you? ;-)

Lane Core Jr. CIW P — Fri. 11/12/04 07:23:34 PM
Categorized as Political.