2004 Election
Why Kerry Lost
Here
are a few opinions offered by media writers soon after the election
concluded.
Gary
Langer, director of polling for ABC News, put it bluntly. President
George W. Bush won the 2004 election for two reasons: 9/11 and women
voters.
…
"[Bush's]
image of leadership, his focus on security, the fact that 9/11 hasn't
happened again within this country's borders convinced Americans,
especially women with families to protect, that this president should
be returned to the White House," Langer said. …
Marking
a major change from 2000 when Al Gore won women voters by 11 points,
Kerry scored only a 3-point lead over Bush, Langer said. And although
single women remained a core Democratic group, the president won
married women by 11 percent, a block that was evenly split in 2000.
"The shift that occurred in this election was among women,"
the polling expert said.
…
During
the opening session, Mark Mellman, Sen. John Kerry's top pollster,
and Jan van Lohuizen, the pollster for the Bush re-election effort,
analyzed their campaigns. "Voters were not feeling a level of
sufficient pain to reject the incumbent," Mellman said. "As
we got closer to Election Day, there was a somewhat more positive
feeling in the country, and that helped the incumbent."
Mellman
said a majority of Americans think Bush has made the country safer
during the last four years. "The Bush campaign used fear very
well to make voters risk averse," he said. "It was clear to
us that people wanted stability in leadership, [they] wanted
stability in politics. We were at something of a loss. We tried
[slogans such as] 'time for change,' we tried 'time for new
direction,' but neither of these were as compelling as steady,
consistent leadership."
…
Van
Lohuizen said presidential campaigns are different from other
campaigns because advertising has less of an impact than conventions
and televised debates. This year, he said, an increasing number of
voters received decision-making information from television news, the
debates and the Internet. "The role of newspaper coverage
declined dramatically," he said. Furthermore, although both
parties put a lot of time and money into person-to-person contact,
"it didn't pay off, it barely registered," he said.
The
Bush campaign also courted the so-called "Hispanic vote."
This year, the number of voters in this group increased 2 percent,
with Bush receiving a 6 percent jump in support. "It was a major
focus of our campaign," van Lohuizen said. But he noted that
"huge differences" exist between Cuban Americans and
Mexican Americans, and between recent arrivals and longtime
residents: "It is not one vote" (Trei 1-3).
President
Bush put forward a powerful and compelling philosophy of what the
government should do at home and abroad: Expand liberty. You can
disagree with Bush’s implementation of that vision, but objecting
to it as a matter of principle isn’t a political winner. John
Kerry, on the other hand, campaigned as a technocrat, a man who would
be better at “managing” the war and the economy. But for voters
faced with a mediocre economy rather than a miserable one, and with a
difficult war that’s hopefully not a disastrous one, that
message—packaged as “change”—wasn’t compelling enough to
persuade them to vote for Kerry.
Without
reliable exit-poll data, it’s hard to know exactly which voters and
issues decided the election, but my guess is that the Democrats will
ultimately conclude that they did what they thought was necessary on
the ground to win the election. Karl Rove and the Republicans just
did more. … The Democratic confidence during the early afternoon
and evening was based on more than faulty poll data. The Kerry
campaign was confident that high turnout from the party base would
swing the election their way.
But
this election wasn’t a swing, or a pendulum. There was no fairly
evenly divided group in the middle of the electorate that ultimately
broke for one side and made the difference. The 2004 campaign was not
a tug of war between two sides trying to yank the center toward them.
Instead, it was a battle over an electorate perched on a seesaw. Each
campaign furiously tried to find new voters to add so that it could
outweigh the other side. Both sides performed capably: Kerry received
more votes than Al Gore did four years ago, and he even received more
votes than the previous all-time leader, Ronald Reagan in 1984.
President Bush just did even better.
Rove’s
gamble that he could find more Bush supporters from among nonvoting
social conservatives than from the small number of undecideds in the
usual voting public worked exactly as designed. The question for
Democrats is whether Rove’s formula will turn out to be a one-time
trick tied to Bush’s personal popularity and the emotional bond the
nation formed with him after the trauma of 9/11, or whether the
Democratic Party has been relegated to permanent, if competitive,
minority status. Are the Democrats once again a regional party, the
new Eisenhower Republicans of the Northeast? For seven consecutive
presidential elections, the Democratic candidate has failed to garner
50 percent of the vote. Not since Jimmy Carter in 1976 has a Democrat
won a majority, and even Watergate could get Carter only 50.1
percent. (Sullentrio
1-2).
Kerry
understood the issues, but had not harnessed them to a greater
vision. He had not compiled an impressive record of legislative
achievements in the Senate. Nor had he been an influential or
consistent voice in the conversation over the direction of the
Democratic Party, a debate that overlapped precisely with his Senate
career. In the public mind, he stood for no particular ideas beyond a
mild and conventional brand of liberalism. His advisers believed that
Kerry's primary claim on the presidency was his personal biography.
In this, they were indulging an obsessive desire of the political
world, and reporters most of all, for a familiar plot line, in which
a heroic life climaxes in a rendezvous with history at the White
House. …
A
candidate who runs principally on his or her biography is acutely
vulnerable to the accusation that this biography is embellished. Such
a candidate, in other words, is a fat target for the Freak Show. One
signature of Freak Show politics is a fixation on personality and
alleged hypocrisy. Another is the ease with which shrewd political
operatives can manipulate the Freak Show's attention to hijack the
public image of an opponent.
Kerry
and his political team knew exactly the story they would impart to
voters. To paraphrase Henry Kissinger's famous line, the story had
the added advantage of being largely true. It began with a bright,
earnest young man whose interest in politics was sparked in the early
1960s by John F. Kennedy, and whose idealism led him to don a Navy
uniform and fight heroically in Vietnam. Coming home, and recognizing
that the war had become a terrible national tragedy, he stood on
principle to oppose that war, and in so doing revealed his patriotism
as valiantly as when he was fighting. Devotion to public service
carried him to the United States Senate. The 2004 presidential
campaign would bring this forty-five-year journey full circle, as the
legacy of one JFK in the White House would be honored by a new JFK in
the White House -- a nearly mystical convergence of history. It was a
powerful enough narrative to help make Kerry the Democrats' consensus
front-runner for the presidential nomination from late 2002 through
the spring of 2003.
But
there was another way to tell the story. It was of a man who had been
nakedly ambitious since his youth and had been willing to trim his
sails to suit the moment ever since. The decision to go to Vietnam
had been an obvious stepping-stone to politics. His tales of combat
valor had been deliberately inflated, perhaps even manufactured.
Sensing
an opportunity to preen for the cameras in the antiwar moment, Kerry
made a big show of discarding his war medals, but secretly hung on to
a prized few. He affected a Kennedyesque accent and went before a
Senate committee and prattled on fallaciously about alleged war
crimes by his fellow servicemen. Elected to the Senate, Kerry found a
natural home for himself as a vain and, thanks to two advantageous
marriages, wealthy politician, with his finger in the wind and his
hair under a blow-dryer.
Would
the real John Kerry please stand up? Of course, both versions of his
life had truth to them. Whenever Kerry's self-image tried to stand
up, it was knocked over by a Freak Show interpretation. Every
positive element of Kerry's existence was neutralized or turned into
a weakness. Every vulnerability was maximized. By the end, this proud
man was lying on the bloodied ice like a freshly clubbed harp seal
(Halperin and Harris 10-11).
Bush
triumphed in a popularity contest: 93 percent of Republicans voted
for him, while only 89 percent of Democrats favored Kerry. Exit polls
indicated that a vote for Bush was primarily an affirmation; 81
percent of the president’s supporters said they voted for him,
rather than against his opponent. In contrast, only 55 percent of
Democrats voted for Kerry; 35 percent cast their vote because they
were against a continuation of the Bush regime.
This
relative lack of enthusiasm for Kerry showed up dramatically when
pollsters asked voters for reasons they voted for and against Kerry
and Bush. The strongest justification to vote for Kerry was “health
care,” which was mentioned by 26 percent of those polled. On the
other hand 37 percent said the strongest reason to vote for Bush was
“response to 9/11,” followed by “the war against terrorism”
(32 percent), “decisive leader” (31 percent) and “his religious
faith” (29 percent). When asked for reasons to not support Kerry,
36 percent of those polled responded, “flip-flopping on issues,”
whereas 32 percent opined their justification for not supporting Bush
was “Iraq and foreign policy.”
… While
voters tended to see Kerry as more intelligent than Bush, and better
able to express himself, Bush was viewed as the stronger leader and
the most honest and religious.
Thus,
in the 2004 presidential campaign, George W. borrowed a page from
Ronald Reagan: Voters tended to separate their favorable personal
feelings for him from their unfavorable opinions of his policies.
Voters
found Bush to be more likable because he conveyed a “common man”
persona, whereas Kerry came across as aloof—professorial. If the
polls had contained the question, “Who would you rather go to a
ballgame with, George Bush or John Kerry?” no doubt a strong
majority would have preferred Bush.
Exit
polls showed a strong relationship between the level of education and
candidate choice; the less education the voter had, the more likely
he or she was to choose Bush. What appeared to be the “dumbing
down” of the president was actually a strategy to make him more
likable.
The
Kerry campaign was at a disadvantage because of the relative lack of
appeal of their candidate. They further weakened the campaign by
making three critical mistakes: First, they failed to make an issue
of the Bush administration’s mishandling of pre-9/11 intelligence.
There was a case to be made that from the moment they took office,
George W. and his advisers were obsessed with Saddam Hussein and,
therefore, committed a series of blunders: discounting intelligence
that indicated that Al Qaeda was planning a major terrorist attack on
the United States, following the wrong strategy in the invasion of
Afghanistan that facilitated the escape of the top Al Qaeda leaders
and the destabilization of the country, and rushing into an
ill-conceived war in Iraq without a plan for the occupation. By
attacking George W. on the issue of security, Kerry could have made a
mockery of the notion that Bush “kept us safe.”
The
second mistake was in not responding swiftly, and effectively, to the
Swift-boat ads. These ads, and the accompanying book, Unfit for
Command, called Kerry’s honesty and patriotism into question,
and tarnished his heroic image.
Finally,
the Kerry campaign never settled on a central campaign theme. For
example, they touched on the issue of moral values and then backed
away. At the Democratic convention, Kerry expressed what could have
been a central theme in the campaign, “It is time for those who
talk about family values to start valuing families,” which
highlighted core progressive values such as fairness, protection, and
equal opportunity. Then the campaign dropped the concept of “valuing
families” and talked primarily about policies.
In
October, when George W. lambasted Kerry as a liberal, the Democratic
challenger seemed unable to mount a defense; he did not offer a clear
expression of progressive values or attack the Bush administration
for investing in the powerful rather than in the people. The Kerry
campaign ignored the reality that the label, liberal, does have a
negative connotation to many voters who listen to Rush Limbaugh,
watch Fox News, or read Ann Coulter. To these Americans being a
liberal means being the bearer of a contagious immorality that
subverts youth, weakens the family, and undermines the defense of the
nation.
For
many Democrats, Kerry was a satisfactory rather than optimal
candidate. Ultimately, his personality was not strong enough to
compensate for the mistakes made by his campaign (Burnett 1-2).
Most
Kerry supporters assumed that there was no candidate more
contemptuous of the American voter than George W. Bush. After all,
he stole the 2000 election and seeing as none of the previous four
presidents who won in the electoral college while losing the popular
vote had ever won re-election, and in three of those cases the winner
of the popular vote in the first election came back to win four years
later, Al Gore archly assumed that he could come back and win in
2004. But actually, Gore was just as contemptuous of the voters as
Bush was, if not more, for refusing to fight for his victory all the
way through the electoral college and congress; but agreed to throw
in the towel and accept the Supreme Court's 5-4 decision over the
decision of the 538,000 more voters who voted for him than for Bush,
not to mention that the Supreme Court is not mentioned in the
constitution in reference to disputed presidential elections.
So
Gore could not run again. Kerry, on the other hand, had spent his
entire life running for president, but unlike George W. Bush, was too
coy to admit it. He may or may not have married Teresa Heinz Kerry
to advance his presidential ambitions; but he wrote a campaign
biography which left no footprints. After finishing the book, the
reader had no idea where Kerry grew up, where he went to high school,
what he did during his summers as a child, etc. There was no
personal biographical information. In Ronald Reagan's autobiography,
in contrast, the book opens with his childhood and the reader knows
all about his summer jobs before he attended college. So, Kerry was
contemptuous enough of the 121 million voters not to trust them with
the truth about himself. Kerry should have rubbed everyone's nose in
his international background and his father's diplomatic experience
as a way of highlighting his own negotiating skills.
Kerry
made other errors, too. He ran a backwards looking rather than a
forward looking campaign. He chose John Edwards, a clone rather than
an asset, to be his Vice-Presidential running mate. Edwards, a
handsome Senator from an east coast state was, like Kerry himself,
short on any substantive accomplishments in government. Kerry was
trying to evoke the aura of his initial clone JFK by choosing
a southern Senator to balance the ticket. And balanced it was, for
50 years ago.
…
Kerry's
wife, Teresa Heinz Kerry, had an uncontrollable mouth. What the wife
of the president says is important. People in high office need to
have self-discipline. Loose lips sink ships.
Kerry's
gratuitous inclusion of Cheney's daughter's sexual orientation in one
of the debates with Bush was shockingly insensitive and showed a
total lack of judgment.
The
late speaker of the House, Tip O'Neill, who came from Kerry's state
of Massachusetts, wrote a book called MAN OF THE HOUSE. In it, he
says that people like to be asked for their votes. George W. Bush
explained his loss in his 1978 House race by his refusal to ask
people for their votes. Many politicians find this hard to do, for
various reasons.
At
the end of the final presidential debate, Bush's final words were a
very clearly articulated, "I'm asking for your vote." Pan
to Kerry. I can't even remember what he said, but I never heard him
ask for a single vote during the whole campaign.
…
the
Democrats' excessive focus on the missing munitions in Iraq in the
final week of the campaign as if the American voters were too sieve
brained to remember the previous four years was typical of the
arrogant, condescending attitude toward the voters that doomed the
Kerry campaign (Leinsdorf
1-2).
Missing
from these opinions is any mention that Bush and his supporters might
also
have
stolen the election.
Worked
cited:
Burnett,
Bob, “Election
2004: Why Kerry Lost." The
Berkeley Daily Planet,
December 10, 2004. Web.
http://www.berkeleydailyplanet.com/issue/2004-12-10/article/20270?headline=Election-2004-Why-Kerry-Lost-By-BOB-BURNETT---Special-to-the-Planet
Halperin,
Mark and Harris, John F., Excerpts from The Way to Win and the
ABC internet article: “Political Pundits on How to Win the White
House.” ABC News, October 30, 2006. Web.
https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/Books/story?id=2517449&page=1
Suellentrio, Chris, “Why Kerry Lost.” Slate, November 3, 2004. Web. https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2004/11/why-kerry-lost.html
Trei,
Lisa, “Why Bush Won in 2004.” Stanford, November 17,
2004. Web. https://news.stanford.edu/pr/2004/polls-1117.html
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