Who got more voters to the polls for Kerry? Bill Clinton or Michael Moore?

I keep seeing all these references to Bill Clinton as though if we had ONLY listened to him, we would have won. Frankly, my sense of it is we are not DIVORCED enough from Clinton and that is costing us. I might remind people that Bill Clinton was very much in support of the Iraq war prior to the start of it. This is the reason he was mainly SILENT about it in his speech to the party at the Democratic convention.

I would also point out that the second greatest number of votes to ANY CANDIDATE EVER went to John Kerry...the first presumably to Bush. John Kerry got MORE votes than Ronald Reagan did. John Kerry got a higher percentage of the voting public to vote for him than Bill Clinton ever did, and Clinton benefited from the fact that the evangelical movement had not fully taken hold of the south by the time he ran.

I also keep seeing posters saying Michael Moore COST us votes. I say he GOT us far more votes than he cost us. I say he reached out to people that would NEVER have voted for Kerry but for the attention he drew to the negative side of Bush...a side that had NOT been portrayed by anyone until his movie cam along.

So don't just vote...tel me WHY you voted as you did.

I am tired of big dawg and other dems coming out and saying what we didn't do and what we should have done to win.

We Won, damnit, they stole it. And, as you noted, Kerry received more votes than Clinton.

We are not the party on the outside, we are not unpopular or out of touch.

prior to his heart surgery? He had several months?

aware that the RWers were gunning for him did more harm to our party than anyone before him. I am not one of the DUer's that is on his fan club list. I hold him personally responsible for the political struggles our democratic candidates have faced and the repukes control of our government. If he hadn't been going through impeachment hearings, would he have been able to really go after Usama instead of the fear of "wag the dog" back lash?

because from my POV, he made it OK to criticize Bushco out loud. Up until that time it's my opinion many people were censoring themselves for the sake of unity or fear of censure or whatever. But when F 9/11 came out the floodgates opened and I started hearing in public what I had been reading here for a long time. It was as if everyone got the feeling that everyone else had been thinking what they were thinking all along and it was both a relief and a wake-up call.

It was a pleasant surprise to have seen F9/11 the first time in an upper middle class area and there was nothing but cheers and obvious supporters. The smearing of MM came when his message so obviously resonated with so many people.

from a friend (Brit) in Bali, Indonesia. He was at a bar and the owner showed F-9/11. Colin was BLOWN AWAY! He wrote me, asking why no legal actions were taken against Michael Moore, so I sent him MM's blow-by-blow factual explanation from his website. I've seen the movie, but the fact that my friend had this reaction reaffirmed how powerful a movie it really is. I am sure many people who might have been hedging about their vote were won over after viewing this flick. Great job, Michael Moore. And what about his tour around the country to campuses? He energized our party--kudos to MM!

Have you heard anything?

about MM's next venture. Fahrenheit 9/11 1/2? But I can't get in the archives. Maybe google it?

I'll do that.

were already voting for john kerry. michael moore brought people who would have voted for bush, and people who wouldn't have voted. lots and lots of them.

i can't understand why the dem "powers that be" insist on distancing themselves from moore, or outright disavowing him. the staggering numbers of people who watched farenheit 9/11 should cause someone somewhere to say, "hmmm...so what's the appeal?"

Bill Clinton's approach on the economy was wrong. It's beyond me that the Kerry team won the primaries on being strong on foreign policy, then abandoned that approach because the Clintons said to focus on the economy. Michael Moore's approach, alone, may have gotten even less votes. He was good for blasting open the doors to Bush criticism, but people do want a pro-active approach to terrorism. Whether he brought more votes against Bush, or cost votes because people thought Kerry was anti-war like MM, I don't know. But I voted for John Kerry because of John Kerry, he just gets it. Global community and lifting up all people; international cooperation on intelligence, money laundering, breaking up terrorist groups; civil rights; environment; sustainable growth and energy; on everything. He's the right blend between MM and Clinton, that's why it's a shame we lost this opportunity to put the world on the right course for the next century.

he was actually weak on foreign policy. He won because he was sold to people as "electable".

That's what made him "electable".

Weak on foreign policy? Afer all this time, it's amazing so many people are absolutely clueless.

Clinton is yesterday's news, and Moore did a much better job of promoting himself than he did of promoting John Kerry.

and I can't stand the lily-livered DINOs who are afraid to be criticized by the Republicanites.

When they say "Michael Moore cost us votes," they probably mean that the yuppies inside the Beltway were offended that a high school graduate from a working class background had the gall to say things that weren't acceptable DC cocktail party chatter. Not only that, he's overweight and lacks any sense of fashion! That's not the kind of spokesman that the Bradley Foundation and the Koch Foundation will approve of! :eyes:

Moore made public facts that we DUers had known for a long time. If the rest of the Democratic Party had been as fearless as he and as knowledgeable about how to grab the guts of the American public, we wouldn't be in mourning today.

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he's a good Democrat, did the best he could, but like all of us isn't perfect or right about everything.

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Just not mine. Howard Dean and Al Gore did that. Without their encouragement I might have defected.

I do think Moore got more votes for Kerry than Clinton and I would say Howard Dean also contributed greatly. His supporters were very reluctant.

that Dean showed Dems they could raise money without being dependent on corporate funds to compete.

Let the lifetime DNCers get the old money. Govenor Dean can keep concentrating on getting more NEW money!!

many of us were dead set against doing so for some time.

...than he did Dem voters.

Because it sounds suspiciously like an opinion.

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I also believe they voted for Kerry because they were informed.

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I know people who were inspired by MM. I don't know anyone who wasn't already voting for Kerry who was inspired by BC.

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Rush Limbaugh is the biggest bigot that ever spewed his filth on the air. I don't hear anybody saying his untruthful, hate-filled rhetoric is igniting the opposition.

NT

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Oooops I mean Creeping Doubt.:P

There were two live ones in here but they got zapped.

Yay, mods!

I think Michael Moore helped energize the base on the Left, but whether we want to admit or not, he cost us votes in some of the swing states. Repubs aren't voting for Kerry no matter what, but I think seeing MM at the convention next to Jimmy Carter, was bad form, and a lost of moderates didn't like that. Bill Clinton helped for that last minute push, but I don't think he helped as much he probably wanted to.

Honestly, for me though, neither one of them affected my vote. I picked Kerry, period. I don;t need celebrities to tell me how to vote.

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is what convinced my lifetime repub brother-in-law to vote for Kerry.

He said he would "never vote for anyone named bush again", and he is convinced bush did not win this election at all. He said too many lifetime repubs like him that he knows did not and would not vote for bush after seeing that film. He is a banker in Plano, Texas and apparently he has had a mouth on at work about the despicable ties to the Saudis the bush family has, since seeing F/911. My sister is a lifetime and active Dem and she says Thanksgiving is going to be much more fun this year with her husband leading the anti-bush discussions for the first time in his life.

He is no fan of Clinton, and frankly I am becoming less and less of a fan of his these days. But it was F/911 that did it for him.

Just one anecdotal and true story from my family in 'red state' Texas.

I know why I voted for Kerry, Clinton had nothing to do with it. And thanks to DU I already pretty much knew alot of what was told in F/911. It was looking into Kerry's lifetime record, and looking at the facts and tossing out the bs and it was my best liberal vote ever. Absolutely spot on nsma.

:yourock:

Alyce

:hi:

I, too, think that the Democratic Party needs to move beyond Bill Clinton. I'd even go a step further, and say that a great deal of the difficulty now faced by the Democratic Party can be traced through the effects of the Clinton presidency. I honestly believe that while he was a short-term relief from 12 consecutive years of Republican rule, in the long-term he did the party more harm than he helped it.

Clinton's main strength was charisma, not the policies he promoted. After he got burned on health care (and a lot of that was his own fault, IMHO, for being too timid to take on the insurance companies), he never put forth another bold proposal his entire term in office. I think the best description I've heard of the Clinton years was a political strategic retreat -- a brilliant one, but a retreat nonetheless.

The big problem in all of this is that retreat is held up as an example of the kind of victory we should aspire to.

Michael Moore reached a lot more people this election than Bill Clinton ever could.

out. How can any politico with an ounce of brains suggest we burn our base when that is exactly what George Bush did both times? Get the base out. The Clintonistas are playing America as though it is a Milton Bradley board game. Rather than actually set up a strategic base in the red states to get our message out which WAS fairly principled where labor and international relations are concerned (even if one disagrees with it) they of course want to pretend to cow tow to the evangelical vote....a move IMHO that will be our death.

and feathering his nest. His Wednesday morning quarterbacking is not needed.
He is the last moderate republican I will ever vote for