Why is Kerry so divisive?

Maybe it's a good thing he didn't win the election. So many people only supported him because he wasn't Bush. I guess that must be the reason he failed to unite the people here at DU. If he can't even unite the people here, how could he ever unite the party or the country?

Really, look at how every single Kerry thread becomes a flame war. I really hope he is not our candidate in 2008, he is just too divisive.

and untrue as well.

Drawing tepid support is not divisiveness. Nice try, though.

Kerry is divisive. He failed to unite the party.

When is the last time a losing candidate united the party?

Your cause and effect are reversed here.

campaign tricks and divided the party. It was really only through the dedicated efforts of the other candidates like Dean, Clark and DK that people decided to vote for him anyway.

You have no evidence of your assertions, you just assert them over and over again as if they were fact.

Winning the primaries. What a dirty low-down trick. How dare he win the primaries knowing how we felt about him. Surely we represent the Democratic Party at large. If we don't like him, he must not be liked.

Yesiree.

Only one of the scant handfull of Kerry threads generated any real discussion, and half the posts there were by you.

I stand by my claims.

I really doubt it.

isn't divisive, but drawing *enthusiastic* support is. Yeah, funny.

?

Kidding. That's the typical response, I suggest, when one dares to question anyone in the party.

Hey, I agree! The fact that he is considering another run, to me, connotes amazing hubris on his part!

by someone with 1200 posts. I asked them how stupid they thought the moderators were, since I have 20,000 posts and no one has figured me out yet.

Amazing hubris is right. So many of us who worked for and voted for him really did not like him much. But we did it because we hate bush.... and we're the ones who are divisive. :shrug:

Because he made Vietnam no central to his campaign--at least at the convention--it opened old wounds about that war. The country hasn't come to terms with its loss in Vietnam, or with the cultural divisions the war spawned. Kerry became a lightening rod for that debate.

Viet Nam was not an issue in 1992, 1996 or 2000. So why did the Kerry campaign decided it would be an issue this year, make it one and then refuse to fight back when they were smeared with it? Crazy.

and withdrawing our troops by 1974--Jon Stewart

You poor dear. Turn off CNN. Turn off all of the goddamn right wing nuts masquerading as news reporters and writers.
Sit down and meditate and let the answers come to you.
Do you hear the answer? Yes, you do. You finally understand that Kerry was not divisive. He may not have been inspirational but he's not divisive.
Bush is the one who is divisive. It is precisely because of Bush's divisiveness that the dems at least partly used a platform of "not Bush" to get out the vote. ;)

and btw, I haven't watched CNN, msnbc or fox in years.

I agree that bush is divisive. But with in the democratic party Kerry is very divisive. I never remember another election like this where so many people voted for and worked for a candidate and at the same time wished he were some other democrat.

I worked in an office with a staff of about 25 people... 5 of them were happy that Kerry was the candidate.

My recollection is that Kerry became the front runner relatively early on and many people rallied behind him as "electable." He could not have earned that label and become the front runner if he were truly divisive. A truly divisive candidate would have had some opposition against him for much longer.

during the primary exit polls people said time after time that they only voted for him because they thought he could win but really wanted to support Dean, Clark or DK. So how did he get to be the "electable one"...because the party said so and the media went along. The party manipulated the primary and gave us Kerry. Look where it got us. The party is more divided than ever, because half they party has their heads in the sand.

Clark engendered no enthusiasm at all. I attended the caucus in Washington state. In my precinct, not a single person was for Clark. Bill Clinton was trying to foist Clark on us and it didn't work.
As for Dean, his style was a little out there, a little too angry. Really. I liked him but he was a bit much. As for Kucinich, I wrote him off as a nut, a nice nut but a nut. He was totally unelectable.
Again, we disagree and we will not convince each other of anything.

the primaries were over in Iowa.

Iowa -- the place where they're still finding parts of Dean's candidacy strewn hither and yon. Perhaps that's why it looms so large for you.

for a mere 119,000 votes in Ohio (which is a state Kerry won anyway). The dicussion wpould be how fractured the Repubs are....Bush is a loser...yada...yada...yada....oh wait...that's true!

He didn't win. Everyone got their hopes up and the election was a crushing loss. Nobody likes to have that happen. Plus, the candidate was flawed. (Some of us believe all candidates are flawed.) Plus other people genuinely didn't support Kerry at the time of the primaries and thought the one they did want might not have had a crushing loss. This stuff hurts, blowback on the candidate is to be expected.

This doesn't have a lot to do with actual numbers. The actual numbers were up for the Dems. Kerry pulled 554,000 more voters in Ohio than Gore did. But Bush pulled 508,000 more voters in Ohio than he did in 2000. And that might even matter when the next national election gets a whole lot closer and strategists get to figuring out what to do to improve the numbers. But it is too son after the loss. Distance and logic come with time. Ahm, did I mention the fact that Kerry lost a race that many, many people wanted almost viscerally to win? And it didn't happen. Actual real live humans should be allowed to react to that with genuine emotion. After all, it's emotion that gets a lot people to give a damn about politics in the first place.

If Kerry decides to run again, then he will end up in the meat grinder of the primaries with everybody else. If enough people hold him personally accountable for the loss, or hold him to be too flawed as a candidate or feel that his actions or inactions were directly responsible for the 2004 loss, then I imagine he won't make it out of the first round of primaries. And if enough people feel he came close enough and ran a good enough campaign against a sitting President in a time of war they will vote for him. It's too far away right now to tell which way that wind is blowing.

that doesn't do and say everything thing they won't them to say and do. If these people would open up their eyes and ears perhaps they might see that Republicans are stealing our elections and NO Democrat is going to win unless we put a stop to election thief and fraud!

I remmeber Kerry being very divisive during the primaries too. Some of his supporters really attacked everyone else no matter what the topic of the thread. I think that kind of attitude is a reflection of the candidate.

Are you representative of Howard Dean or DFA? Should I hold Dr. Dean responsible for your attitude? Is that about the dumbest thing I've ever heard? Could be.

I think everyone here knows that you are an adherent of the good Doctor. That's fine. Something in what he said or did moved you and continues to motivate you politically. Again, fine. But this did not happen to everyone, else we would be full of robo-responses to the tune of "Isn't Gov. Dean great, I really love everything he has ever done, said, thought of or eaten." "Why, I feel the same way, only more so." That would be rather dull and greatly undemocrat-like as well.

Do you wish to bring people, their time and their money to the support of DFA? If so, you might think about changing your motivational tactics because I think that the ones you currently employ might be a scoosh hostile. Just an observation.

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Heard of it?

be patient.

with him. I thought his "costumes" made him look "elitist." No matter how many DU'ers assured me that his attire wasn't "elitist" ...most expensive, flamboyant...I still thought he looked weird..for his age. If he'd just stuck to one sport...I would have thought ..WOW! But, it made him look at 60 years old like he was "all over the place," or trying to "outdo the Chimp" who had fallen off his new "three wheeler" after his doctor told him "Mountain Biking" was better for his knees than joggin. :shrug:

That's what bothered me about Kerry...Otherwise I thought he was an excellent Candidate...and never thought he wouldn't beat Chimp...I still don't..inspite of all Kerry's odd outfits.

So he's elitist because he's in good shape and can do things like windsurfing and snow boarding while Bush is doing well not to fall over every 15 minutes?

afford. It was like he was "flaunting it." I don't like folks flaunting their "athletic prowess and gear" in my face. :shrug:

I thought the undecideds were the key. They were all Democrats?

I'm sick of the elitist bull shit, especially when we have the son of an oil tycoon family as our President.

now people are pissed off over 2000 and 2004. I think his concession was very damaging to the party.

That he didn't unite us and was too divisive?

But you think he won?

how would those things be mutually exclusive?

That is the real question.

He must be "electable" then.

Odd, Cheswick says that Kerry attacked the other candidates. But isn't that what Cheswick is doing right now, standing in one candidate's corner, and attacking the guy he didn't support?

Does this always happen when there are that many candidates on one side in the primaries?

Meanwhile we must have some political newbies in this election, because some of them act like they never saw politics being played before. Not dirty tricks, just politics.

Like Bush was gonna fight fair. If you couldn't make it out of the primaries, you weren't going to be any match for Bush.

(and I happen to think if we can hold ourselves together that the Republicans are going to be the ones who split themselves)

Thank you for your understanding.