Unable to blame Ralph Nader, the Democratic Party blames women (Teresa Heinz Kerry, Mary Beth Cahill) and gay marriage advocates.
<blockquote><http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,3-1344943,00.html> November 05, 2004
'I can't believe I'm losing to this idiot' By Tim Reid The Democratic challenger repeatedly shot himself in the foot
JOHN KERRY constantly squabbled with his difficult and hypochondriac wife, ran a campaign team riven by internal feuding, and repeatedly begged the Republican senator John McCain to become his running-mate, according to a riveting inside account of his doomed presidential bid.
The Massachusetts senator was so obsessed with getting advice from a multitude of rival advisers that one aide confiscated his mobile telephone. His wife, Teresa Heinz Kerry, became such a moody distraction that in the closing weeks of the campaign another aide instructed her to stop whispering advice in his ear and back off.
At the same time, according to Newsweek, the relentlessly disciplined Bush White House, which only once descended into near panic after the President's disastrous first debate performance, became so aghast and delighted at Mr Kerry's ability to shoot himself in the foot that they almost felt sorry for him.
One of the untold stories of the presidential campaign was the erratic behaviour of the candidate's wife, the Heinz heiress Mr Kerry married in 1995, according to Newsweek. She drove her Secret Service detail mad with her chronic lateness, constantly demanded attention, including her husband's (who seemed to tread on eggshells when around her). She even sent him off on errands, such as fetching bottles of water. She clashed with Mary Beth Cahill, Mr Kerry 's campaign manager, and Mr Kerry was caught in the middle.
At the climax of a coast-to-coast campaign tour after the Democrat convention in August, Mr Kerry's aides had crafted a family holiday hike in the Grand Canyon, with the candidate's wife and two daughters, Alexandra and Vanessa. But shortly after the hike began, Mrs Heinz Kerry was soon complaining of migraines, telling her husband that she could not go on.
The end of the hike led to one of the biggest blunders of Mr Kerry's campaign, one of several times he fell squarely into traps set for him by Mr Bush's re-election team.
For several days, Mr Bush had been issuing this challenge to Mr Kerry: if he knew before the Iraq war that no weapons would be found, would he still have voted to authorise the war (Mr Bush insisted that he, as President, would still have invaded). Asked this by a reporter at the Grand Canyon, Mr Kerry said yes, he would still have voted to give Mr Bush "the authority" to invade.
In Bush-Cheney headquarters, they could hardly believe their luck that he handed them another flip-flop. But they had always believed that, properly baited, he could be led into a trap. Inside the Bush re-election "Strategery Room" (named after a famous Bush malapropism), a sign above the door read: IT'S THE HYPOCRISY, STUPID, a reference to Mr Kerry's constantly shifting positions.
The greatest moment inside this room came when Mr Kerry, after days of baiting by the Bush campaign over his vote for the war, but his vote against an $87 billion (�47 billion) request for funding it, told a rally: "I actually did vote for the $87 billion before I voted against it."
"Oh my God," said Terry Holt, Mr Bush's communications adviser, as he watched the blunder on television. Mark McKinnon, Mr Bush's advertising chief, said: "The second we saw it, we knew we had a new ad. The greatest gifts in politics are the gifts the other side gives you."
Mr Kerry, now in sessions with a speech coach, grew increasingly frustrated. After a faltering press conference by Mr Bush in April, and with Iraq in turmoil, Mr Kerry exclaimed: "I can't believe I'm losing to this idiot".
During the early summer, Mr Kerry implored Mr McCain, the maverick Republican who ran against Mr Bush in the 2000 Republican primaries, to become his running-mate, meeting him seven times. He even offered to expand the vice-presidency to include running the Pentagon. "I can't say this is an offer because I've got to be able to deny it," Mr Kerry told Mr McCain. "But you've got to do this."
Mr McCain told him he was out of his mind, and went on to embrace Mr Bush. "Goddammit," a furious Mr Kerry said to an aide. "Don't you know what I offered him? Why the f*** didn't he take it?" At the time, Mr Kerry also thought that John Edwards, his eventual choice, was overly ambitious. "What makes this guy think he can be president?" he asked staff in February.
After the anti-Kerry Swift Boat veteran attacks in August that questioned his Vietnam service, Mr Kerry's campaign was in turmoil, beset by feuds, indecision and dithering. Mr Kerry, often generous to his staff but a constant whiner, had reverted to indecision, unable to straighten the mess out.
Enter James Carville, Bill Clinton's former strategist. So appalled was he by the chaos inside the campaign, and so desperate to see Mr Bush defeated, that in early September he decided that Miss Cahill had to be ousted, and Joe Lockhart, Mr Clinton's former spokesman, inserted as manager. When he called a meeting with the pair, he was so worked up, he began to cry, screaming to Miss Cahill: "You've got to let him (Mr Lockhart) do it!" Mr Lockhart duly took over, and Mr Clinton's former campaign team virtually moved in. When Mr Kerry telephoned Mr Clinton in hospital hours before his heart bypass surgery to wish him luck, he received a 90-minute lecture.
Mr Clinton, correctly sensing that "values" would play a crucial role in voters' minds, urged Mr Kerry to back local ballot initiatives calling for a ban on gay marriage. (Mr Kerry refused).</blockquote>
<blockquote><http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/05/politics/campaign/05newsom.html> The New York Times November 5, 2004 Some Democrats Blame One of Their Own By DEAN E. MURPHY
SAN FRANCISCO, Nov. 4 - A year into his job, Mayor Gavin Newsom could hardly be more popular. A survey last weekend put his approval rating among San Franciscans at 80 percent.
Polls show that a mainstay of the Democratic mayor's support has been his stance on same-sex marriage. But with his party reeling from Senator John Kerry's defeat on Tuesday, Mr. Newsom's decision in February to open City Hall to thousands of gay weddings has become a subject of considerable debate among Democrats.
Some in the party were suggesting even before the election that Mr. Newsom had played into President Bush's game plan by inviting a showdown on the divisive same-sex-marriage issue.
Most of the talk has been behind closed doors. But when Senator Dianne Feinstein, a fellow Democrat and Newsom supporter, answered a question about the subject at a news conference outside her San Francisco home on Wednesday, the prickly discussion spilled into the open.
"I believe it did energize a very conservative vote," Ms. Feinstein said of the same-sex marriages here. "I think it gave them a position to rally around. I'm not casting a value judgment. I'm just saying I do believe that's what happened."
"So I think that whole issue has been too much, too fast, too soon," she added. "And people aren't ready for it."
Kate Kendell, executive director of the National Center for Lesbian Rights, who was a witness at the first same-sex marriage at San Francisco City Hall, said she received a flurry of angry e-mail messages on Thursday from people upset about Ms. Feinstein's public dressing down of Mr. Newsom.
The topic was also raised with Mr. Newsom himself at a news conference on Wednesday and when he was a guest on a radio talk show here Thursday morning. He said he had no regrets.
Some of his backers were less restrained. In an interview, Ms. Kendell accused Ms. Feinstein of looking for "easy scapegoats."
"Shame on Senator Feinstein and other Democratic leaders for latching to the most facile and shallow of explanations for the results," she said. "What Mayor Newsom did really accelerated the conversation and the movement, and I will never accept an analysis that says a leader who stands for equality and fairness and who has the courage of his convictions is doing the wrong thing."
One openly gay member of Congress, Representative Barney Frank of Massachusetts, disagreed. Mr. Frank was opposed to the San Francisco weddings from the start and told Mr. Newsom as much before the ceremonies began. He urged the mayor to follow the Massachusetts path, which involved winning approval for the marriages in court before issuing licenses.
In a telephone interview on Thursday, Mr. Frank said he felt vindicated by the election results. In Massachusetts, every state legislator on the ballot who supported gay rights won another term. By contrast, constitutional amendments against gay marriage won handily in 11 states - including Ohio, an important battleground - in large part, Mr. Frank said, because of the "spectacle weddings" in San Francisco.
Mr. Frank said Mr. Newsom had helped to galvanize Mr. Bush's conservative supporters in those states by playing into people's fears of same-sex weddings.
Had the Massachusetts approach been followed, he said, "I think there would have been some collateral damage" in the election, but "a lot less."
"The thing that agitated people were the mass weddings," he said, adding, "It was a mistake in San Francisco compounded by people in Oregon, New Mexico and New York. What it did was provoke a lot of fears."
"He created a sense there was chaos," Mr. Frank said of Mr. Newsom, "rather than give us a chance to show, as we have in Massachusetts, that this doesn't mean anything to anyone else."
Some conservative opponents of same-sex marriages concurred. Though the backlash against gay weddings was kick-started by court rulings in Massachusetts - and even earlier in Alaska and Hawaii - opposition resonated with a much broader group of conservatives after Mr. Newsom put San Francisco at the heart of the debate, said Jordan Lorence, a lawyer with the Alliance Defense Fund, a Christian group that sued to block the marriages here.
The California Supreme Court eventually declared the 4,000 or so weddings invalid, but the images of same-sex couples' embracing in San Francisco were permanently etched in the public's mind, Mr. Lorence said.
"The court decisions have been the triggers, but Mayor Newsom definitely accelerated the reaction," Mr. Lorence said. "I think we can get 10 or 15 more state constitutional amendments in the 2006 and 2008 election cycle, and maybe even more, because people feel so strongly about this."
In a telephone interview, Mr. Newsom acknowledged that he had taken some heat from fellow Democrats. But he said the criticism was off the mark. Mr. Bush decided to use gay marriage as a political wedge well before the weddings in San Francisco, the mayor said, and the issue had already been politicized by the court rulings in Massachusetts.
Mr. Newsom offered no apologies.
"If you think something is right," he said, "you have a moral obligation to act."</blockquote> -- Yoshie
* Critical Montages: <http://montages.blogspot.com/> * Greens for Nader: <http://greensfornader.net/> * Bring Them Home Now! <http://www.bringthemhomenow.org/> * OSU-GESO: <http://www.osu-geso.org/> * Calendars of Events in Columbus: <http://sif.org.ohio-state.edu/calendar.html>, <http://www.freepress.org/calendar.php>, & <http://www.cpanews.org/> * Student International Forum: <http://sif.org.ohio-state.edu/> * Committee for Justice in Palestine: <http://www.osudivest.org/> * Al-Awda-Ohio: <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Al-Awda-Ohio> * Solidarity: <http://www.solidarity-us.org/>
