Incompetent, but it still came within a few hundred thousand votes of winning. The person who must be maddest of all about all this is St.Hillary, who must be thinking that she (with Bill's Machine behind her) could have easily done as Bill did and beat this Bush, and maybe even gotten a majority of the vote (unlike Bill).

"and Kerry, whose hearing was damaged by gun blasts in Vietnam, had trouble understanding some of the questions being thrown his way. But he pressed on, coughing from the pollen blowing on the breeze."

Lame excuses from the lame candidate of a lame party.

Pollen in the desert?

Lamest. Excuse. Ever. Kerry continues to amaze as to just what a loathsome cretin he truly is.

How, in the light of the McGovern and Mondale blowouts, can this be considered the worst run campaign in our life-times? As Raoul mentions, Kerry and his people came within 150,000 Ohio votes of winning the electoral vote. This is a guy with a past of pure opportunism approaching treason, a gold-digging Northest liberal with the wife from Hell, and he made this election extremely close. In my mind, his campaign did a good job of coordinating "third-party" anti-Bush slander with Kerry's thoughtful, almost professorial demeanor. All he needed to do was not personally give people a reason to vote against him, while not alienating the liberal base, and let the anti-Bush brigades undermine the president (at all costs). Given the situation, including the need to keep the various liberal factions on board, and weakness of the candidate, I think it was a good strategy that was not-at-all-badly executed.

I don't think the Kerry campaign itself was run very smoothly, but the media did everything it could to help it.

But at what cost? RatherGate exposed what hypocrites CBS are, more and more people know about the New York Times' fabrications, and all-in-all, the mainstream media's credibility is at its lowest ebb. And the Democrats' eagerness to nominate a candidate who makes Bill Clinton seem ethical and moderate doesn't help their standing either.

Having given it their all and lost, how do the Democrats or the media (but I repeat myself) even begin to restore any sense of credibility?

It was between the GOP convention and the debates that Kerry's campaign got its' act together.

Fortunately he'd already been damaged enough by his flip-flops to forestall winning although it meant he prevented Bush from achieving an electoral landslide by not having more of the Midwest switch over.

That being said he did manage to run stronger than Gore did in WI and MN.

This is a partial list of incompetent campaign management from the article:

Kerry was his own handler on Iraq, aides said.

At one point, when aides tried to coax him into a simpler message, he spread papers on the floor to show how the fine points of his arguments fit.

"John got caught with his legalistic and logical mind wanting to make consistency matter, and not let them say [he's] a flip-flopper,"

Even as aides fretted that Kerry had not found his voice on the issue

They hoped it [primary voters flocking to Kerry] would happen again.

Kerry took a snowboarding break at his wife's Sun Valley, Idaho, getaway

"We [the Bush campaign] kind of set the trap [with the original ad], and then he walked right into it."

Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, the group that would later blindside the Democrat's campaign

[T]o extend an olive branch to … veterans Kerry went on NBC's "Meet the Press" and confessed that his accusations had been "a little bit over the top."

When Kerry finally started giving foreign policy speeches by the end of May, his words had a term paper quality.

Begala, knowing the senator was a former prosecutor, asked the candidate to present his case to voters to hire Kerry and fire Bush. …This was a list, not a "case," Begala fretted.

'From that day to now, I [Begala] never heard another word from her [Cahill]. And you know, I was pretty angry. I'm still pretty angry."

[Kerry] … is also adept at keeping secrets, even from his staff.

Kerry's frenetic use of his cellphone …

His first choice was Senator John McCain of Arizona.

Kerry telephoned the charter company that was providing his campaign plane. [This one is just stunning. Shades of Jimmy Carter...]

Only six lines of his acceptance speech were devoted to his 20 years in the Senate

"As soon as we saw it [damage from the Swift Vets], we moved," Shrum said. [Demonstrating why “we’ll respond to any attack” isn’t great strategy]

"A presidential campaign always has to be an expanding pie. You must always say, who can I bring in?"

Nothing helped Kerry think more clearly than an afternoon of windsurfing the Atlantic behind his wife's $9 million Nantucket beach house.

Well I think that list would convince someone who was a close observer of the political scene.

I doubt the average voter really cared or even knew about the internal campaign wrangles and whether or not Kerry went snowboarding.

I know it's hard, but let's win with dignity and grace. There's something sad and poignant here, that we should respect.

Here's a guy, John Kerry, who worked incredibly hard to achieve a lifetime goal, and he failed after coming close. I can't help but think of Abraham Lincoln -- a completely driven person who did not relate well to others, whose "ambition was a little engine that knew no rest."

Kerry's campaign was, in restrospect, a lame one for the media as much as it was for the senator himself. Since he gave voters no positive reasons to elect him other than his mega-ultra-deca-hyper-giga secret plans that would cure all the world's ills brought on by George W. Bush, he also gave the press nothing they could sink their teeth into in the way of a positive, uplifting message, the way Clinton and Gore did in 1992 with their (admittedly bogus) post-convention bus trip across the heartland.

That meant that while the media in general was willing to play cheerleader for the candidate, he was giving them nothing to really cheer about. So to make up for the lack of positive news, several media outlets went into overdrive to come up with damanging negative news against Bush, even if the sources turned out to be flat out lies at worst, or shaky at best. We'll still have to see if there are any long-term ramifications for the New York Times and CBS, since they're the two main culprits in the whole kerfuffle.

Had Hillary run, the Clinton campaign machine obviously would have done a better job of initially packaging the candidate with a message, aside from the obvious reuse of the "Year of the Woman" stuff played up by the Democrats in 1992. But the missus' disposition is -- how shall we say it -- not quite as "sunny" as her husband's, and her self-control in keeping her temper in check in front of the public hasn'r been as good as Bill's in the past. That's something that may have affected her if she had run this year, and will be something they'll have to work on between now and 2008 (though as the Time, Newsweek and Boston Globe stores on Kerry indicate, so long as only the press and not the public 1s watching, Mrs. Clinton could carry a speargun along with her on the 2008 campaign to fire at aides who displease her, and most of the media would turn a blind eye until after the voting is over, so long as they're not winged by accident)

"I can't help but think of Abraham Lincoln..."
Mmmm, no.

"done this very differently from the way President Bush has"

yada, yada, yada --- He never said how he would have done it differently, though. Maybe wearing a tutu?

It was a pretty good run for someone who served his Communist masters faithfully for all those years. In the end God continued to look after drunks, children, and the United States of America.

MA liberal in war time with a rising economy.

This ain't brain surgery.

Without the DNC/MSM megaphone this election would have confirmed Ray Fair's model - 58%. We now know the precise value of the MSM and have good reason to work to destroy them.

St.Hillary and the speargun— exactly right. When the press refuses to tell the people what's going on, or at least treat each campaign equally, one candidate can get away with anything. Those like us who have been watching may not be surprised by these "tell all" articles, but I'd bet the public is learning a whole lot of new things about the man 48% of this country almost sent the White House.

The GOP and conservatives should not be counting on this sort incompetence saving their sorry hides in the future, but must start, now, actively promoting ways to counter the 10% edge that the press gives their chosen candidate. (What, I don't know. But the people who spread lies about the draft, or missing explosives, or spread forgeries should pay a professional price for once.)

The press must be reformed from within; it will not be destroyed from without.

Jim,

The press must be reformed from within; it will not be destroyed from without.

I'm barely a high-school graduate, so maybe I'm missing some enlightening Marxist nuance, but is not Professor Fair's predictive model now thoroughly discredited? He was way, way off.

A gadfly who garnered 57,000,000 votes...........A man who uses a Senate seat to convince his wives and himself that he's important; a man who used a war in which he fought on both sides as his foundation of intellectual integrity. Scary.......

I think Fair's model probably gives us a semi-accurate view of what this race would have looked like had the media behaved less bizarely.

It would be interesting to see a combination economic/favorable media model based on that supposition.