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December 22, 2004

Gilliard: Stop whining!

Steve Gilliard finds the circular firing squad intact:

But I was irritated by the people posting that Kerry sucked and the primaries were rigged against Dean....

Yawn.

Kerry ran a good campaign, but Rove made it about the issues of evangelicals and they came out. It's real simple. It wasn't gay marriage alone, but religion in schools, and Bush's image as a religious man.

The problem is that he ran Nixon's 1972 campaign. Which means while he beat the Dems, the issues are working against him.

Both sides are wrong in this debate. Amy Sullivan and Peter Beinhart think that selling out core democratic principles will get them to power. They won't.

But the people who think Howard Dean could ever be president are also delusional. That Confederate comment pretty much closed a lot of minority doors to him. That comment helped Kerry with a lot of blacks and latinos and killed Dean as just another white liberal who took blacks for granted. You can ask Mark Green how that works as an electoral strategy.

The fact is that John Kerry got more votes than any other Democrat in history and stands a better than average chance of winning in 2008. Hillary Clinton, who I think is unlikely to run, won't make it past two primaries if she did. Her personal unpopularity is so high that it makes a national run impossible, regardless of current polls. All of this squabbling is pointless.

There's more...a lot more. Go read it.

Steve is absolutely correct. Kerry ran a good campaign. He recieved a record number of votes. You can't get that unless you've done something right. Rove ran a better campaign..but just barely.

Gilliard leaves out something else that I think is important. Democrats made substantial gains at the state and local levels. If you had told me two years ago that a Democrat would be the governor of Montana (Mon-freekin-tana!) I'd have said it was time to put down the crack pipe. The mountain states have made big gains for Dems at the local and state level, bucking the trend at the federal level.

The key of course is to maintain and increase these gains in the coming years. These gains can translate into gains at the federal level, eventually.

The other important notion here is the role of Howard Dean. I believe Steve is right when he says Howard can't be President. I think Dean's most powerful and important role is continuing to build the grassroots and Democratic Party reform. Dean is the reformer, the builder...the Goldwater of the Democrats. (Kevin is going to argue with me about this).

The time for self flagellation is over. The time for whining is done. Put down your weapons, circular firing squad.

Posted by Carla at December 22, 2004 08:28 AM