Feingold thrashing Kerry in a Salon interview, among other things [View All]

http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2005/10/10/feingold/index.html

The conventional wisdom coming out of 2004 was that a big reason why John Kerry lost was because President Bush appeared to be a stronger leader on national security issues. The conventional wisdom now says that if a politician says we should leave Iraq before all of our goals are met that will be seen as a sign of weakness.

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You were involved in the 2004 race, supporting John Kerry. Looking back, what were the mistakes that he made or his staff made? What do you think cost him that race?

I think the mistakes really began with the 2002 congressional election. We were doing very well in the Senate races. And we had a great chance to hold the Senate. I saw that many Democrats in the caucus understood that this Iraq war didn't make sense from the point of view of 9/11. It didn't really seem that persuasive on weapons of mass destruction. But what the party decided, it seemed, was, "OK, look we can't beat Bush on the national security stuff. We'll just cede foreign policy to the Bush administration, and we'll beat him on domestic issues, where clearly we had the upper hand." I felt at the time -- and I certainly voted against the war -- thinking, in part, that there is no way the American people are going to elect a party that only feels they are better on the domestic side.

That's the context that this 2004 election occurred in. And that's the context, that people like John Kerry and John Edwards were stuck with votes in favor of the Iraq war. They were in a box. Those of us that didn't think it was a good idea and didn't think it related to 9/11 were able to say, as Howard Dean said, we never thought this made sense. It put Kerry in this terrible position, even though I think he did as well as he could, of having voted for the war but being critical. And then, of course, the really devastating piece was having voted against the $87 billion , which I happened to have voted for. It just put him in a bind. I think it all related to the decisions that were made in 2002 for which we paid a price in 2004.