Reply #45: You ignore that Kerry spoke out more than any established politician

[karynnj]

and still does. He was alone in criticizing the use of the Afghan warlords in 2002.

You are also not considering where the country was in 2004. I know people still angry because they thought he hit Bush to hard on both "misleading the country to war ...." and on his criticism of various Bush wrongs - such as Abu Ghraib, the unguarded ammo dumps, and the need to fire Rumsfeld. Remember Kerry and Dean called for Rumsfeld to be fired - Edwards, Clinton and most of the other Democrats didn't. Kerry morphing into Michael Moore would have led to a landslide - for Bush.

Where on the spectrum do you think he had to win people? There were very few votes cast for the left wing third parties and he got 9 million more votes than Gore did - it's very hard to argue that people stayed home. Remember how traumatized the country was. Do you really think that the Presidential candidate telling people that the US has been an outlaw nation for most of the last several decades - which is what you are saying when you say Bush I, Bush II and Reagan were criminals. It takes time and a very clear cut case to get people to believe unpleasant truths. This is not the view most people in the country have of our role in the world.

Kerry used BCCI in the way it could be used. He spoke at University of Pennsylvania about how he would deal with terrorism. He spoke of an international sharing of intelligence and law enforcement, with an occasional military component. He spoke of how he knew that you could shut down criminal networks - because he had done it with BCCI, OBL's bank. He spoke of it in teh NYT Matt Bai article as well. In a shorter form, it was often in his stump speech. Just as the media ignored all his environmental events and speeches, these were poorly covered.

Kerry was one of the few to speak of the Downing Street Memos - including in the letter demanding that the intelligence committee do part 2 of the WMD report, that is still not done even with the Democrats in charge. Kerry even mentioned the DSM on various talk shows. As a test of how common knowledge this is - try at the next family gathering or at work asking people if they knew about the Downing Street Memos. This is in spite of having some NYT coverage. Kerry also has mentioned PNAC, especially after Bush's second inaugural address. That speech, widely praised at the time in the NYT, WP and elsewhere, changed why we went to war, but no one seemed to notice.

I know that a group that I belonged to of liberal Jewish woman had a meeting where we discussed F911. The result most found it unfair and hated what they termed the guilt by association linking of the Bushes to OBL. These were all people who had voted for Gore and were intending to vote for Kerry. Imagine a less Democratic group.