Posted on 11/09/2002 6:54:28 PM PST by Bella_Bru
Simon ran a horrible campaign. He should have run against Davis's record instead of focusing so hard on Davis's corrupt fundraising tactics. Releasing that photo, which turned out to be nothing, was stupid, stupid, stupid.
Obviously, Parsky needs to go too. The main job of the party chairman is to get out the vote. He failed at this and should be replaced.
I cannot believe they are suggesting that Simon run against Boxer. Forget it...Simon should try for a House seat before he tries another statewide candidacy. His inexperience at running a campaign was part of his problem.
It really is sad though. With only 48% of Republicans voting, he still got 42% of the overall vote. The California GOP should be ashamed. They could have won this, despite Simon's mistakes.
Parsky didn't like Simon, because of a business deal with Simon's dad that went sour.
Davis won SanFrancisco with 66%. There are not that many gays in SanFrancisco. There are considerably more immigrants than gays.
If the immigrants voted republican, and the gays voted democrat, it would have been a landslide for Simon.
In case you didn't notice, Riordan lost the primary and Bush and Rove then tried to help Simon. I tried to help Simon.
But you are blaming the general election loss on Rove and Bush "interfering".
Simon has only himself to blame; he was an amateur and he blew the election through inexperience in dealing with a vicious and cunning opponent, namely Davis. And you should square your shoulders and admit Simon lost the election, and Davis won it, and not try to blame others.
Wrong. Most Independents and a lot of Republicans and some Democrats would have been happy to vote for RINO Riordan over Grayout Davis.
In another four years, California will be in such bad shape from businesses bailing out of here, and Dems will be so mad at him for cutting their favorite programs that the voters will line up to vote for whomever the Republicans run, so go out there and groom another candidate, or send Simon to Electoral College 101 and run him again.
Simon himself was an amateur, but his team was anything but.
There were many missteps by many people in the Simon campaign. If you have a problem with someone pointing them out, you must be a novice in politics.
The fact is that any Republican, no matter how good he is, is going to start out with a severe handicap--being a Republican in a Democrat state.
With that in mind, any Republican candidate is going to have to be twice as good at everything than his opponent. Most importantly, he'll have to have a clear agenda that appeals to a broad spectrum of voters, and he'll have to be able to communicate them effectively. He'll have to have twice as much charisma, twice as much charm, and have twice the one-on-one people skills as the Democrat. He'll have to run an upbeat, positive campaign. He'll have to work twice as hard. And sadly, but realistically speaking, he'll have to be able to attract twice the money--which means he'll have to already have some name recognition going into the campaign.
I don't know if Simon had any or all these things, since I didn't really follow this race. But I do know that even from 3,000 miles away, it didn't look good with that whole campaign contribution photo thing, and being "exonerated" in court was even worse. A candidate going through legal proceedings during a campaign is a disadvantage any way you look at it.
Simon's team may or not have been the absolute best, but they had too many negatives to overcome, IMHO.
The sorelosers blaming Bush
His "team" was split into two camps, they were fighting amongst themselves and Simon. For ex., Simon wouldn't read or greatly changed some of the stump speeches.
It seems that the faction that released the Photo-Gate picture, had this early in the year and was waiting to release it later, closer to election day. They even commented they have a "Silver-Bullet" back in June. The article detailing the problems was posted on F.R. late last week.
The real pro, I don't recall if it was Ed Rollins or not, quit in disgust early on.
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