Wojtek Sokolowski wrote:
> Kerry did an excellent job addressing various moral and religious issues
>in a statesman-like manner
> without falling into theocratic thinking, but evidently that was not good
> enough for the voters.
-gonna take this opportunity to jump into all this bollock spouting, -Kerry was a piss poor candidate and we've known that all along , there -was no great mass turn out, as I said before Nader's loss was Kerry's -gain with no apreciable increase in Democratic turn out.
What are you talking about? Gore received 50.9 million votes. Kerry received 55.3 million votes, almost a five million vote increase. As a percentage of eligible voters, Kerry got a higher percentage of that potential vote than and Democratic candidate since Jimmy Carter won in 1976-- who got roughly the same percentage of the potential vote-- and far more than Bill Clinton did in either 1992 or 1996.
Kerry had his weaknesses but he also had his strengths. He ran on a very progressive platform-- pro-union, anti-death penalty, pro-choice, pro-education-- with concrete goals to improve the lives of people we all care about. And he never pulled a Sister Souljah maneuver or screwed welfare moms as a political ploy, as Clinton-- a far better politician admittedly -- did to gain moderate support.
There are many things we all need to do better as progressives, especially engaging the religious population in a vigorous and respectful way that will pull them away from the Bush-GOP embrace. That takes real organizing over years, not just rhetoric from a candidate, so that's a big project for progressives to take on in coming years. There are groups working on it, but they are underfunded and not strongly supported, so that needs to change.
Nathan Newman