Reply #9: I sort of agree with you about the swift boat thing

[liberalpragmatist]

You saw my thread on the issue. Kerry did actually fight back - albeit a couple weeks too late. THe issue definitely hurt him somewhat. However, while I think he should have fought back sooner, I'm not sure it wouldn't have changed the overall result. The media still would have had a field day with the story and still would have peddled it as a "he said/she said"-type thing.

I think the bigger mistakes were not making clear a broader theme animating Kerry's foreign policy/terrorism positions. He shouldn't have ceded "freedom and democracy" to Bush, and should have argued that Bush was setting back the course for freedom.

The other big mistake in my view was his saying he'd have voted for the IWR even knowing there were no WMDs - he was clearly parsing, trying to not flip-flop but it reduced him to near incoherence on Iraq for a few weeks until his NYU speech (which should have come a few weeks earlier).