Don't Hate

It is obvious that the Kerry campaign was a very poorly run campaign. That’s something that Democrats and Republicans alike can agree on, but when I read articles like James Verini’s "It’s the Incompetence, Stupid" and hear first hand accounts from people who volunteered or worked on the campaign, I am shocked at how truly inefficiently and ineffectively it was run.

As Verini wrote, many Kerry supporters were simply "Bush-haters" who didn’t know much about Kerry himself. According to Verini, "The one thing everyone did know? Kerry was not Bush. For most, that was enough." Did the Democratic Party actually think that that would be enough? Based on the articles I have read and the stories I have heard, it seems as though the Democratic Party wasn’t so concerned about winning. This was clearly their election to lose. With Bush’s increasing unpopularity and the unpopularity of the war, even a slightly well run campaign should have been able to beat Bush.

I think both parties learned, or should have learned, a valuable lesson from this election. I think one of the main reasons the Kerry campaign was so ineffective was because the Democratic Party chose a candidate that it wasn’t passionate about and didn’t feel like making an effort to get behind. In Verini’s own experience, "[He] made hundreds of phone calls; all but a handful of people claimed to be too busy to do even a few hours work for Kerry. This, despite many of them admitting to being scared as hell for the future of our country (not to mention that they were answering their home phones at, say, 2 p.m. on a Wednesday)." These people needed a candidate that could connect with them, and one that they could feel motivated about. Dislike or even hatred for the opposition is not enough. You must evoke passion from the voters or at leat the would be volunteers. The Demcratic Party failed to do that in 2004, and I just hope they keep it up in 2008.