Posted on 01/02/2005 7:48:43 AM PST by flixxx
KERRY SPEAKS: WHAT WENT WRONG Sun Jan 02 2005 10:35:31 ET
New York-In an exclusive interview about his presidential campaign and his life now, Sen. John Kerry tells Newsweek, "I'm not going to lick my wounds or hide under a rock or disappear. I'm going to learn. I've had disappointments and I've learned to cope. I've lost friends, a marriage: I've lost things in life."
Kerry has not given any formal interviews since his defeat. But on Nov. 11, he summoned a Newsweek reporter to his house on Boston's fashionable Louisberg Square. He wanted to complain about Newsweek's election issue, which he says was unduly harsh and gossipy about him, his staff and his wife. (The 45,000-word article, the product of a yearlong reporting project, is being published next week as a book, "Election 2004," by PublicAffairs.) Details from that interview appear in the January 10 issue of Newsweek (on newsstands Monday, January 3). Kerry talks with Newsweek about the campaign, why he lost and what's ahead for him. He did not wish to be directly quoted touting himself, however; he did not wish to appear defensive or boastful.
When asked why he lost the election, Kerry points to history and, in a somewhat inferential, roundabout way, to his own failure to connect to voters-a failure that kept him from erasing the Bush campaign's portrait of him as a flip-flopper, reports Newsweek Assistant Managing Editor Evan Thomas. Kerry said that he was proud of his campaign, that he had nearly defeated a popular incumbent who had enjoyed a three-year head start on organizing and fund-raising. Sitting presidents are never defeated in wartime, he insisted (true, though two, LBJ and Harry Truman, chose not to run for another term during Vietnam and Korea).
While he quarreled with descriptions of his speaking style as "soporific," Kerry tacitly acknowledged that he failed to connect with enough voters on a personal level. Jose Ferreira, Kerry's nephew, told his uncle, "Some people are saying that your candidacy was driven by ABB [Anything But Bush]." Kerry replied: "Do you think so?" Ferreira said that once people got to know Kerry, they were intensely loyal. "Those are the people I let down," Kerry said, falling silent. In conversation with
Newsweek, Kerry seemed particularly interested in trying to find a way to speak to ordinary voters that didn't sound too grandiose or "political." Though Kerry did not directly criticize his friend Bob Shrum, it's clear he did not feel well served by his message makers and speechwriters.
The deeper problem may be Kerry's personality, which may be too distant or reserved to win mass affection. As Thomas left Kerry's house in November, Kerry called out and followed him down the street. Kerry wanted to show a letter from a schoolgirl that had been left on his stoop. The letter read, in part, "John Kerry, you're the greatest!" Kerry looked into the reporter's eye. "The pundits have never liked me," he said. "Is it the way I look? The way I sound?" He seemed vulnerable for a moment, then caught himself, smiled and walked home to his empty house.
In the heady days before the election, Kerry's top aides sat around picking a cabinet. Nowadays the foreign-policy team still meets on the assumption that it could be reconstituted for '08. But the reality is, "it's mostly sitting around some lawyer's office and asking each other if we've heard about jobs," says a member of the team. As for Kerry, says this adviser, "he thinks he's the frontrunner for '08 without recognizing that he needs to do some soul-searching. If he wants to come back, he'll have to come back as a different candidate, not the stiff who plays it safe and takes four sides of every issue."
Developing...
Kerry was the most non extremist and palatable candidate the dims offered.
What went wrong? The democrat party.
Your are so dead on the money! ABB did play a big part.
sKerry is proud of his taking the alternative path in the Senate. Instead of proudly touting bills passed, he supposedly let other people take credit for his "bills", while specializing, instead, in investigations. So among my top reasons for never considering a vote for Kerry are the investigative trip to Nicaragua for a photo op with Manuel Ortega, the investigation (read: coverup) in Vietnam explaining away why some of our POWs didn't return home, and an investigation of BCCI, once known as the most famous scandal never reported by the American MSM. Must be that too many fingers pointed at Clinton associates.
Here's Paperless Archives' review of Kerry's visit to Paris, along with an archive of 20,000 FBI documents:
http://www.prweb.com/releases/2004/6/prweb132432.htm
Also, try doing a Google search. I entered into a Google search: John Kerry negotiation Paris Peace talks, and came up with a lot of good articles.
Aside from the die-hard liberal base who will vote for anybody that was running against Bush, I think a good number of the rest of Kerry's votes came from uninformed voters who either thought Bush/the gop was mischaracterizing Kerry's record and can't be bothered to check it out for themselves, and some people who didn't care that he was a hypocrite because they figure that all politicians are, in some way, shape or form. Whatever was the case with those voters, I think the bottom line was that they were dissatisfied enough with Bush's liabilities, whether real or perceived, to vote for Kerry, or rather, a "change."
Nicely rolled up into a Kerrydoobie !
BUMP
Howzabout this?
"I've had disappointments and I've learned to cope. I've lost friends, a marriage, a presidential election. I've lost things in life. I'm tellin' you. Boy howdy."
What really is scary is undecided voters, gee if you can't make up your mind by a week before campaign then i think just don't vote
"...to read. Election results and stuff, with big words and numbers...."
WOW devolve, you outdid yourself on this post!!!
Are things so bad, Kerry had to sell his furniture and fire his servants?
About those flowered spandex windsurfing outfits.......
Those were actually chosen for him by his buttler, but there's absolutely no truth to all of those, you know, rumors.
Dang, did I mis-spell a word in my previous sentence?
He will never understand that he lost the election because he committed treason 35 years ago. He should have been charged.
Plenty of them will see it as one more piece of strategic genius, masterful misdirection on Kerry's part. After all, they've already convinced themselves that even though Kerry plans to be in Iraq when (either the electoral votes are opened on the 6th, or during the inauguration on the 20th, I can't remember which), that's just a strategic move on his part. They're a real piece of work, those DUmmies.
MM
What you said, ditto x 10! You nailed it. The very idea that this TRAITOR could get so close to winning is a tribute to the media's power to control the minds of so many Americans. Frightening!
Howard Fineman, on the Imus program this morning, indicates he was at Kerry's townhouse in Boston on 11 Nov.
As for Kerry, says this adviser, "he thinks he's the front runner for '08 without recognizing that he needs to do some soul-searching. If he wants to come back, he'll have to come back as a different candidate, not the stiff who plays it safe and takes four sides of every issue."Even Kerry's advisers admit that he took four sides on every issue. The liberal press gave Kerry a pass by seldom mentioning Kerry's previous positions every time he announced a new nuance on his policies.
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