Should Republicans go ahead and add Supreme Court Justices to head off Democrats

The other Dem excuse--Kerry ran a bad campaign

Jonathon Last:

SO IT'S COME TO THIS: I'm John Kerry's last defender.

Two pieces of conventional wisdom emerged from last week's election. (1) Republicans owe their victory to anti-gay marriage initiatives and a massive values divide; and (2) John Kerry was a lousy candidate. Both are wrong.

David Brooks has fairly dispensed with the first trope, I'll tackle the second.

Writing in the Progressive, Matthew Rothschild complains that Kerry "never could give a decent speech." Since November 3, other Democrats have seconded this notion, and more. In Salon, Farhad Manjoo called Kerry "a pretty poor candidate;" Alexandra Pelosi went one further, pronouncing him "a terrible candidate." Mark Halperin laid nearly all of the blame for Tuesday's loss at Kerry's feet, saying, "John Kerry had a lot of problems too. . . . the Kerry campaign, with a bad candidate, a worse candidate, was not good enough to win."

Martin Peretz has recently written an entire ode to his dislike of Kerry.

And even before the election, people like Mickey Kaus and Noam Scheiber dumped on him from the beginning of his candidacy until almost the very end. This caterwauling is silly and unfair to John Kerry.

Did John Kerry run a poor campaign? Yes. Kerry never articulated where he stood on Iraq or, more importantly, how--exactly--he would be tougher than Bush in the war on terror....

The reason Kerry could never articulate a coherent Iraq policy is that two-thirds of his party wanted to cut and run and two thirds of the rest of the country thought that would be a horrible mistake and a retreat from the war on terror. He could either side with President Bush and send his base to Ralph Nader or he could side with his base and lose in a land slide. He actually did a pretty good job of finessing his incoherence by claiming Bush had made a mess (which his base agrred with) and saying that he could stay and fix it (which the rest of the country wanted to do). His problem was that he could not convince enough people that he would really finish the fight. His anti war instincts kept slipping out along with his "global test." Given his screwy base, he ran about as good a campaign as anyone else could have for the Democrats. Until the Democrats quit making excuses and recognize that their policies are being rejected they will continue to lose elections.