Anyone just hear Oliphant on Franken's show?

His take on Kerry's records was interesting. He thinks it was a mistake, and blames the mistake on Kerry not having a campaign manager early on who was "Kerry's equal" and could talk straight to him and be taken seriously.

He also talked about every modern age presidential candidate wanting to preserve some modicum of privacy, and how only Shrub and Darth Cheney have managed to do it (because of a cowed press??)

I can accept just about anything Oliphant says about Kerry because he speaks with so much understanding and affection.

I went back and added to my original post.

but, while he may be right about not having somebody to help him manage all that, I think he is wrong with the record. Releasing them would have changed nothing.

I don't think it would have changed anything either.

I guess I'm grateful there is at least one member of the media who treats Kerry with respect. There's a sense of affectionate teasing he gets (after all, he knew Kerry when) when he talks about him. And the bit he said about Kerry acting as his own campaign manager - well, I've heard stories that bear that out. He's strongminded, and it takes a tough manager to boss him around even a little.

and actual story that (alas) did get it right.
)WHO'S IN CHARGE OF THE KERRY CAMPAIGN?
Boston Globe, THIRD, Sec. Op-Ed, p A15 09-08-2004
By BY SCOT LEHIGH

JOHN KERRY HAS RECENTLY DRAFTED SOME TOP DEMOCRATIC TALENT INTO HIS CAMPAIGN - AND IT'S ABOUT TIME. JOHN SASSO, ONE OF THE PARTY'S BEST STRATEGIC THINKERS, HAS JOINED THE NOMINEE ON THE PLANE, AND THERE HAS BEEN AN INFUSION OF FORMER CLINTON AIDES AND ADVISERS INTO THE HEADQUARTERS.
That's the good news for Democrats. But here's the bad news. Right now, well-placed sources say, it's not completely clear who is in charge.

"It is fairly chaotic over there," says one Democratic source. "Nobody has total control, and that is very dangerous."

Not so, insists Sasso. "Whatever the outcome of this campaign, Mary Beth Cahill rescued the campaign in the fall, she led it successfully through the primaries, and she remains fully and steadily in charge as we head into the showdown finale," he says.

Others, however, paint a somewhat different picture.

With the addition of Clintonistas Joe Lockhart, Joel Johnson, and Doug Sosnik - and greater anticipated participation by consultants James Carville and Paul Begala and pollster Stanley Greenberg - they describe a series of competing camps.

There's the old infrastructure of former Ted Kennedy staffers Cahill and Stephanie Cutter plus consultants Bob Shrum, Tad Devine, and Mike Donilon; there are the new Clinton recruits; and there are Kerry's longtime Boston advisers.

The current plan, they say, appears to be to avoid talk of any sort of campaign shake-up by quietly divvying up some important functions among the new recruits. But there's a problem there.

"You can't win a race like this by committee," says one Democrat observing the campaign closely.

During his two decades as a senator, Kerry has never been particularly good at building an effective, well-integrated, high-performing staff. But he needs to do that now. During the last month the Kerry campaign's effort was decidedly subpar. The message has been muddled, the strategic thinking murky, and the press office sluggish.

Nothing better demonstrated the inadequacies than the Kerry team's tardiness in responding to the mendacious mugging it took at the hands of the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. "This was a case of political malpractice," laments one national Democratic strategist. Indeed, his team's laggardly response is said to have exasperated the candidate himself.

...

Ahm, he did get better. (Ahm, well, we all knew this stuff)

That's why it's true love. Complicated guy. :loveya:

From Time 8/2/04

Harriman was a dreadful politician, though. After one dour term as Governor of New York, he was trounced by the ebullient Nelson Rockefeller. Politics doesn't seem to come naturally to Kerry either. His mother's civic propriety and his father's diplomatic propriety are a crushingly noble legacy. They haunt his every move. My guess is that Kerry's near death process works like this: He starts a campaign trying to do the right thing, but successful politics requires all sorts of creative roguery. His sense of civic propriety limits his ability to act ruthlessly (firing his campaign manager, for example) or flamboyantly (giving an entertaining, personal, red-meat stump speech). Kerry's sense of policy propriety renders his attempts at political expediency--the promises and compromises necessary to woo constituencies--tortured and unconvincing. He writhes about, descends into rhetorical abstractions, spends too much time thinking about what he is doing wrong and comes across as distanced, distracted, aloof. A perfect phony. And then Kerry's primordial sense of survival on the battlefield, honed and burnished in Vietnam, kicks in, and he does what he must to win: he acts like a real politician. From a distance, the process seems like a comic-book-hero transformation. Kerry enters the phone booth sipping French wine and emerges with a knife in his teeth, ready for battle.

In the 2004 Democratic Primaries, Kerry's near death experience had everything to do with his vote to support the war in Iraq. I remember seeing Kerry at a Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) cattle show a few months before the Iraq vote, in the summer of 2002, and he stood out among the various Democratic pretenders for one simple reason: he talked clearly and concisely about the war against al-Qaeda. He blasted "a new conventional wisdom of consultants, pollsters and strategists who argue ... that Democrats should be the party of domestic issues only." He then criticized President Bush for not using U.S. troops to capture al-Qaeda leaders trapped at Tora Bora after the Taliban government fell in Afghanistan. Instead Bush had "turned to Afghan warlords, who only a week before were on the other side," to make the attack. It was a bold stroke by Kerry, challenging Bush from the right, calling for a more vigorous military strategy. And it worked. The Senator from Massachusetts--not John Edwards or DLC favorite Joe Lieberman--was the candidate who made the deepest impression that day.

And then he disappeared. On Oct. 11, Kerry cast his vote to authorize force in Iraq--and a very different, cautious, incoherent Kerry emerged on the other side. Before long, he was sucked into that "conventional wisdom of consultants, pollsters and strategists," having hired what seemed to be several thousand of them. But it wasn't the consultants or Jim Jordan or even Howard Dean who was poisoning his campaign. It was Kerry and his utter inability to explain his vote on Iraq.
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This is actually quite sympathetic. (At least Klein tried to understand the guy. And there is a lot to be said for being over-consultant-ed.)

It's freakin' brilliant.

Klein pissed me off in his writings about Kerry innumerable times over the course of the campaign, but this is dead on.

Did I mention I saw Klein? My daughter and I saw Kerry make that great foreign policy speech in Manchester NH right about the time his campaign started to turn around. It was scheduled for the Manchester Public Library auditorium; the campaign was clearly worried there wouldn't be enough people to fill up a larger venue.

Well, it was packed. It was overflowing - people mobbed on the front lawn hoping to get in. People standing in the aisles.

Klein was in the auditorium for that speech. I turned around in my seat and saw him studying Kerry and taking notes. Too bad so many of his other columns sold Kerry way short. This one doesn't.

that Kerry's a much better politician than any reporter has EVER gtiven him credit for. They just time after time fail to understand his down-to-earth appeal to down-to-earth people. Just 'cause they can't see it doesn't mean it isn't there.

He may not be a great natural pol, but he is a tremendous communicator - as Klein alludes to - when he's not trying to be a pol.

I can't break copyright, but I do have impressions of what Klein wrote. (And maybe I can quote a bit more. There was quite a bit more that was really interesting.)

I am well aware that I sometimes post things that can seem downbeat. I don't see them as downbeat when I post them. (I have a quirky mind, I guess.) What Klein is saying in one of these paragraphs is that, outside of pure campaign mode, Kerry knows how to govern. He knows how to extract information from all the research he has his staff do. He knows how to weigh the various and sundry competing interests and come out with a statement of policy that is sound, substantive and can be defended against the opposition. He can govern. He arrives at his decisions in that famous 'walkabout' way. The process is slow, deliberate and thorough. But he knows how to make sound policy and sound legislation. (He can friggin govern, which is his damn job, after all.)

The *ies can't govern. They can lie their way into office, they can lie to the very people they claim to be helping and they can appeal to the lowest common denominator factors of xenophobia, fear and religious prejudice. They can launch pre-emptive wars and they can shove their choices through a cowed congress that is afraid to take them on. What they can't do is govern. They absolutely suck at it. They can't come up with an honest budget. They can't conduct anything even resembling a decent foreign policy. They use intimidation and deceit to push awful legislation through congress that harms the people. They can't govern.

There were other things in that article that did speak of pure political guts. Kerry's famous decision to mortgage his half of the Townhouse in Boston was a very courageous move that a lot of people tried to talk him out of it. They told him that if he lost Iowa and didn't recoup his losses he was facing foreclosure on what was his only real asset and might have to leave the Senate in order to earn enough money to pay back the loan. He did it anyway, because he was so confident he would win. (I loved that move. It was ballsy as hell.)

The other thing he mentioned was the break moment that you talked about. That was the moment when all the votes were over for 2003 and Kerry could really focus on his own campaign. The speeches got much, much better, more focused and the attacks on Bush became deeper and harsher. (Loved that.) Sigh!

broke my heart, actually. It was so humbling, and so brave. I upped the amount of money I was giving him every month when he did that. I was worried about him losing his house. Can you believe that?? I thought it was brave as hell, but I had no idea where he was going to get that kind of money to pay it back. He's not really a gambling man, so I saw it as an act of faith in himself.

The moment just has to be right. His gambles are not impulsive, they are well thought out, but I think he is a gambler. He had done this a number of times. (Iran-Contra was a gamble, he was gambling his reputation and career. The drug-running case was the same thing. It didn't crap out, but neither did it pay off.)

There have been a lot of moments that when it came time to lay it on the line, he did so.

I guess we define "gambling man" differently.

I see * as a compulsive gambler, throwing $$ and reputation on the line time after time on bad bets (i.e. Bolton, Iraq, etc.)

I know Kerry takes and has taken a lot of risks in his career, so I guess you could call them gambles - but calculated ones. Very different from *.

In fact lately, I've been thinking a lot about *'s gambling tendencies. The stakes are as high as they can be, yet he has no sense whatsoever of danger. I always think to myself, "He has two daughters who have to live in this world. How can he behave like this?" I still haven't come up withan acceptable answer to that question.

from lying about Kerry's record.

And so thoughtful. I loved the way when he talked about Kerry not having given up on running again "by a long shot" he didn't feel it necessary to add a snarky comment.

Mistakes were made. Some personalities mesh better than others.

with all the mistakes, he won at least 48.3 % of the vote. He would have done even better with a little better organization.

Has anybody been following the series at LUTD about "Why I am optimistic..." ? (EDIT: "The 2004 Elections Make Me (Cautiously) Optimistic".) It talks about how everywhere in the U.S. except for the south, things are trending Democratic--we are on the rise at the city and state level, and that it will inevitably influence the national level. It really perked me up. I think we have room for improvement, and we will, and will take back majorities in the very near future. We've got the money now, which is huge.

criticism, esp. fair criticism is not a problem. Bashing is a problem. There IS a difference.

I can accept fair criticism.

but when you start denying the man is really a democrat, youre gonna get my wrath and when you say hes jsut iike Bush, that shit not what Mr. Oliphant is doing pisses me off. I am not sure if I agree with Oliphant or not but I respect him because his criticisms of Kerry are far unlike those we see too often.