7 – John Kerry (2004 Election)
Kerry is yet another genuinely mystifying pick by the Democrats, this time for the 2004 Election. George W. Bush had only scraped into office in 2000 where he beat the dull and uninspiring Al Gore. The Democrats clearly thought this was a good strategy (he only barely lost right?) and chose another candidate with the charisma of a plank of wood. The party could have taken back the White House with a better candidate since the first Bush Jr. administration ended with America in two wars; one was possibly justified while the other was not. As a result, the American public was frustrated by news of dead soldiers and bogus WMDs.
Alas, Kerry was not the man to benefit from their disaffection and he ran a pretty dreadful campaign if truth be told. While he criticized Bush over the Iraq War, he wasn’t able to make much headway in the polls and he made a real blunder when it came to his own military record. The Swift Vets and POWs for Truth campaign hurt Kerry badly; they suggested that he lied about the effectiveness and indeed the nature of Swift Boat operations in Vietnam. There were even baseless allegations that he lied to get war medals. He was far too slow to respond to the accusations of his former mates and his campaign even backtracked regarding a mission in Cambodia and his behavior in the battle that earned him his bronze star.
If that wasn’t bad enough, the Bush campaign managed to successfully paint Kerry as a ‘flip-flopper’. The Democrat nominee didn’t help his cause by actually flip-flopping over certain issues. For example, he said that marriage was something between a man and a woman but he didn’t support any of the numerous state bans on gay marriage. He didn’t respond when Democrat Party members said those against gay marriage were backwards thinking homophobes. It got even worse when he brought up Dick Cheney’s lesbian daughter during the third presidential debate. No one really cared about the vice president’s daughter and it ruined the momentum he had gained by seemingly ‘winning’ all three debates.
The coup de grace was allowing himself to get dragged into a fight over the so-called ‘battleground’ states while ignoring the rest of the country. This was a real missed opportunity to distinguish himself from Bush. Instead of grasping the nettle, Kerry revealed himself to be a typical politician that only cared about stats and winning rather than the people he represented.
Despite his dismal campaign, Kerry managed 48.3% of the vote and only lost 286-251 in the Electoral College. A less incompetent candidate could quite easily have won the election for the Democrats. Kerry lost Ohio by just 2.1% for example; he would have been President had he won this key state. Incidentally, he had approximately $14 million of unused funds at the end of his campaign. In American politics, not using your entire war chest is perhaps one of the biggest mistakes of all.