Why the Kerry Campaign Failed

James Verni, a Kerry volunteer on the West Coast, says what no one else dares: It was the Kerry campaign, not MoveOn.org, ACT, or anyone else, that did the campaign in.



It's at Salon, so a subscription or day pass is required, but here are some excerpts:

Let me tell you about the disorder and complacency inside the Kerry-Edwards campaign itself. Look no further for why Democrats lost the election.



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Most of the Kerry supporters I met on the campaign trail, meanwhile, were really just Bush-haters. The lack of knowledge or even curiosity about Kerry, his career and his proposals, was astonishing. Almost no one working alongside me had the slightest inkling of Kerry's policy initiatives (clearly laid out on his Web site). No one knew what he'd done in the Senate. Many volunteers, even some paid staffers, didn't know how long he'd been a senator.



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The one thing everyone did know? Kerry was not Bush. For most, that was enough.



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In the big Southwestern city operation where I spent the most time, a city that was the main population center of its state, and where Kerry's future would hinge on making direct contact with a few thousand urban and suburban swing voters, the campaign was haphazard and impotent. While the operations and press staff sat at their computers, tracking metrics and trying to spin reporters, no one seemed to want to take responsibility for the hundreds of callers and door-to-door canvassers who, like myself, were actually talking to those crucial voters.



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The precinct captains, whose job it was to decide which precincts to target, and to divvy those precincts up and shuttle canvassers to them, were for the most part poorly paid kids in their early 20s, just out of high school or still in college. They, too, seemed to have only the vaguest idea of who Kerry was or why they working for him, outside of a nameless dread of the future. They were committed but left largely unguided and, it appeared to me, uninspired by their superiors, and they had none of the unshakable confidence I saw among the Bush team.



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Despite all signs pointing to a massive left-leaning youth turnout, the campaign's presence at the three major Southwestern state universities I visited was nil. Perhaps the Kerry people figured that the 18-24 vote was in the bag. But you should never rely on such assumptions, as the Democrats' increasingly poor showings among minority voters showed.



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Still, the Kerry staffers I spoke with -- from the operations chiefs to the press crew to the precinct captains -- were possessed of a kind of wishful confidence, based not on any particular allegiance to the senator but on what E.M. Forster would have called panic and emptiness. No one could imagine a Bush win. The prospect was unthinkable. How could America reelect him? It couldn't. So it would elect Kerry. It must. Such went the tortured logic.

The article makes clear what I felt about Kerry from the beginning: All this focus on Kerry's "electability" as opposed to "That insane hothead Howard Dean" wasn't based on the man's voting record, or any sense of him as a human being. It was based on one thing: his military record. No one would dare attack a war hero, the conventional wisdom went. The Kerry campaign was based on one meme and one meme only: "I went to Vietnam and George W. Bush didn't." Way back when Dean was surging and people in my own family thought that Kerry would be a better choice because of the military thing, I told them: "If you think that Kerry's military service is in any way going to inoculate him against attacks, you're fooling yourself."



This is a "What have you done for me lately?" country, and one perfectly willing to believe the lies fed to them over the television screen. John Kerry gave an impassioned speech against Bush's war plans -- and then voted for them. I remember listening to that speech while sitting at my desk at work -- and letting out a stream of invective when he finished it by saying he'd vote for it. It was a cynical, purely political vote, and it backfired on him.



Looking at blogs and messageboards during the campaign, it seemed also that the extent of the Kerry Message was: "Look at who we're running against! How can we possibly lose?" This is a message reminiscent of Jon Lovitz' old sketch on SNL in which he portrays Michael Dukakis at a debate saying about George H.W. Bush: "I can't believe I'm losing to this guy."



I'm convinced that many of Kerry's supporters were of the "He's not Bush" variety, and you can't win elections that way. I saw, I FELT the energy surrounding the campaign of Howard Dean. We would have gone to the ends of the earth for that man. Even political cynics like me, who had long since given up on the process, were energized....and we began to believe that we just might pull this thing off. Of course, there's only so far that simple enthusiasm can take you, and the inexperienced young Dean Team in Iowa wasn't equipped to deal with the Mighty DNC, who behaved like Republicans in helping to derail Dean's candidacy. But most of us, aware that Bush had to be defeated, decided to be Good Soldiers one more time and support John Kerry.



At times he seemed worthy of that loyalty. I blogged right here at one point that I wanted him to be my president. But those moments were few and far between, and as Kerry foundered under the Swift Boat Liars' attacks, and seemed pathetically unable to articulate any kind of a vision, other than "We have a plan" and long-winded position papers delivered verbally, I slowly began to realize that the Democratic Party had put up another loser. Those of us who knew the stakes showed up to vote. But Kerry never put the fire in the belly of enough people to make them go to the polls in droves, regardless of weather or wait time. I'm not sure you need to regard your candidate as the Second Coming of Christ the way the Republicans regard George W. Bush, but you do need to believe in him. And even the people in Kerry's campaign couldn't find it in themselves to do that.



In answer to the inevitable question: Do I think Howard Dean could have beaten George W. Bush? Probably not. I don't think anyone could have beaten George W. Bush, given the Axis of Fraud that is Karl Rove, the mainstream media, and the voting apparatus in this country. But I do believe that Dean would never have turned the other cheek to the vicious attacks of Rove & Co., and he would at least have inflicted a few wounds on the way down.