I Cogitate

The New Yorker December 6, 2004 issue contained an article by Louis Menand titled "Permanent Fatal Errors" that offered the most cogent single reason why John Kerry had no chance to beat George Bush in the 2004 presidential election.

The author writes about a meeting at Stanford of poli sci wonks and polling pros where many different reasons are offered for Kerry's defeat.

But Gary Langer, director of polling at ABC News provides the most dead-on reason: 9/11. Langers says as Menand writes: "Fifty-four per cent of voters on Election Day said that the country was safer now than it was before September 11, 2001...And perhaps, I would suggest, more important, forty-none per cent of voters said they trusted only President Bush to handle terrorism, eighteen points more than said they trusted only John Kerry...Among those who trust only Bush to handle terrorism, ninety-seven per cent, quite logically, voted for him. Now, right there, if forty-nine per cent of Americans trust only Bush to handle terrorism and nine-seven per cent of them voted for him, those are forty eight of his total fifty-one percentage points in this election. Throw in a few more votes on ancillary issues and that's all she wrote."

Game, set, match.

Take moral values, lack of charisma, Gods, guns and gays, plus all the rest and stuff it.

Kerry never provided a visceral and coherent national security justification that separated himself in the minds of the American public from President Bush. He failed to even make it close.

Possibly no opposition candidate could have triumphed over a sitting President in a time of terrorism and war but how to do so was amazingly not a thought-out component of Kerry's campaign.

It wasn't money. It really wasn't dirty tricks. It was a strength, or should have been a strength of the Democratic candidate that was never clearly articulated.

Amazing.

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