--- Wojtek Sokolowski <sokol at jhu.edu> wrote:
> So if that was the case, why did he attract the largest number of
> people
> voting for him in recent history, more than Clinton or Gore. If he
> was such
> a handpicked functionary, unpopular with the masses, people would
> not bother
> to come in droves and support him, no?
Woj,
No, not necessarily at all. As has been discussed on this list ad nauseum, Kerry was a sort of "catch-all" candidate for the ABB crowd, the committed DP droids and those swept up in the MoveOn/Dean frenzy.
I don't remember Kerry ever having the passionate following that supporters of Dean or Kucinich had (or hell, any of the rest of the primary candidates like Clark and Edwards - there was a huge Clark contingency in Texas alone), yet Kerry always won the primaries. It was like the DP just pushed one candidate, and Kerry was going to be it, period. And as we've discussed, people who didn't want Bush or who felt strongly about stem cell research or who had hard feelings about other singular issues didn't feel as though they had any other option than Kerry, hence his large pull of votes.
> You seem to be forgetting that a lot of people register to vote for
> the
> first time to support Bush - and that cannot be explained by the
> alleged
> lackluster character of Kerry campaign or inside Democrat politics.
Not forgetting that at all. In fact, I think Kelly and I both pointed out at various times that the attitudes and movements we were seeing in Limpdick and Tex-ass were pretty strong and more indicative of "middle" America than most pundits (and folks on this list) believed to be the case. (I wonder if some still believe the culture wars are over and the religious right lost!) I had a devil of a time trying to convince my own 18 year old babysitter to reconsider her fervent desire to vote for Bush, but in the end, her conservative Catholic sensibilities won out. "Fire Insurance," the old euphemism for "getting and staying right with the Lord," still carries weight throughout the South and much further beyond.
Which brings up another observation, which is that DP leaders last night were gleefully admitting in the early evening that yes, they had attempted to make Kerry the first president-elect to not carry a Southern state in order to win. Har, har, har, they seemed to be saying. Now that's some of the liberal elitism of which you and others speak. And it bit Kerry and Co. in the ass. They forgot that southern parts of Ohio, Indiana and Iowa feel like southern states. They also forgot that the stereotypical sensibilities of the southern states now goes far beyond geographic lines. When they wrote off the South, they wrote off most of middle America and pockets beyond.
- Deborah