He won all but 4 states. He did far better than the fundamentals of that election predicted. The campaign was far better run than 2016.

Last edited Fri Feb 2, 2018, 11:43 AM - Edit history (1)

She helped cost us the White House in 1988 and 2004. In both cases, we lost essentially unloseable races (Dukakis was seventeen freaking points AHEAD after the convention) because we did what she told us to do and left every right-wing smear unchallenged, while refusing to defend the idea of being "liberal" when both Bushes attacked it

Bringing her back means running the 2020 race the SAME way.

It means giving up on winning.

What possible justification could there be for EVER running another campaign the way the Dukakis and Kerry campaigns were run?

has been pretty useless. I'd rather trust grassroots organizations to drive victory instead of an out of touch DNC.

I suppose I can live with this if she makes the most reactionary, defeatist sector of the party even less relevant.

It raises money and builds State Party organizations.

How likely is it that a "fight like hell for the people!" campaign will be run if the DNC is saying "We can't fight back against smears, we have to defer to the GOP, and for the love of god we can't ever try to win the argument on the issues"-which was the attitude that dominated both the Dukakis and Kerry campaigns.

Neither of those campaigns featured anybody doing anything that should ever be repeated in any future Democratic campaign.

And I don't know of Ms. Cahill actually having any particular skills.

To my knowledge, neither the Dukakis nor Kerry efforts encouraged the idea of building State Party organizations OR demonstrated any particular competence at fundraising. Their main fundraising idea was the Tony Coelho notion that we should be just as much a party of corporate donors as the GOP and that we should privilege the policies big donors supported over what rank-and-file Dems wanted. What was EVER to like in that?

In the primaries, the candidates have to win the nomination. Then the nominee has to expand the campaign to run a 50 state race. The candidate NEEDS to have the local parties functioning well. One huge problem Kerry had was many state parties were very weak. This meant a lot of the GOTVwas done by organizations that could not directly advocate for Kerry. If Ohio had a strong, organized party, they would have noticed that cities were getting fewer voting machines than they got in the primaries. Fixing it that would have led to a President Kerry.

Howard Dean in 2005 took on the task of fixing the state party as DNC HEAD. Had he won the nomination in 2004, he would have been stuck with the same weak state parties Kerry had.

Your post was a creative, though thoroughly unsupported, series of allegations.

If you're agenda was to create bumper-stickers, the first one was a little lengthy to fit on one. If your agenda was anything else, some objective evidence to support your claims (and post hoc ergo prompter hoc isn't evidence, it's merely a logical fallacy) would go a long way in establishing validity.

In December 2003 he was at 60 percent approval which was higher than Obama 2011. Models that predict which party would win showed it a tough year for a Democrat.