To my thinking, the job of partisan supporters is not just to vote for the party candidate themselves, as they can't win the election on their strength alone. They have to encourage others close to them to get out and vote for the candidate. When partisan supporters are lacking in political enthusiasm, however, they are less able to mobilize their peripheral voters than otherwise.
I suppose that the AnybodyButBush strategy, such as it is, is that campaigning against Bush is enough to get out not just partisan voters but also others on their periphery. If anti-incumbent sentiments are enough, though, Kerry should be able to win a landslide victory, but even the most hopeful ABB reading of the current electoral balance of forces can only suggest that Bush's lead is smaller than it may seem and that the election, a very tight race, is more or less a tossup.
> > If even partisan supporters of the Democratic Party can't get
>> enthusiastic about Kerry, it is unlikely that anyone else is.
>
>This willfully ignores the central dynamic of all campaigns: that
>what wows the wing alienates the centrists and vice versa.
The thing is, though, that Kerry's message isn't even a forthright centrist message skillfully delivered to win swing voters -- it is simply unclear and unconvincing, as Stanley Fish (no radical), who knows a thing or two about rhetoric, explains (at <http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/pipermail/lbo-talk/Week-of-Mon-20040920/021380.html>).
And a centrist dodging of truly decisive issues -- worst of all, by supporting the opponent's position on them to just get them out of the way -- is NOT a winner. 2004 is looking more and more like the return of 2002, a debacle after the Democratic Party failed to oppose Iraq and tax cuts for the rich!
<blockquote>Nothing came of nothing. The Democrats lost the Senate, lost seats in the House, and picked up significantly fewer statehouses than they had counted upon.
On what should have been the Democrats' defining issues, they endeavored to be indistinct. They could never bring themselves to oppose Bush's tax cut, his trillion-dollar handout to the rich, though that made it impossible for them to advocate any significant programs of their own. Nor could they bring themselves to oppose the White House's headlong charge into Iraq, though polling showed over two-thirds of the American people oppose a unilateral war. So Missouri's Jean Carnahan, Colorado's Tom Strickland, New Hampshire's Jeanne Shaheen and Georgia's Max Cleland -- Democratic Senate candidates in close races -- backed the president. All of them lost.
The candidates were merely following their leaders. Senate Majority (now Minority) leader Tom Daschle condemned the tax cut but did not call for its repeal. House Democratic leader Dick Gephardt supported the president's Iraqi adventurism and pushed it through the House at the earliest possible moment, so the Democrats could refocus the nation's attention on their domestic message. Which, unfortunately, did not exist. (Harold Meyerson, "Debacle," <em>The American Prospect Online</em>, <a href="http://www.prospect.org/webfeatures/2002/11/meyerson-h-11-06.html">November 6, 2002</a>)</blockquote>
>This does however suggest an original explanation for why the LV
>polls are so much worse than the RV polls and (and why this is esp.
>true with Gallup): because when used month before the eleciton,
>likelihood becomes a direct function of confidence, and Kerry
>supporters are an extremely skittish bunch who are absurdly easy to
>spook into depression and despair. We're all sure disaster looms
>even when we're ahead; Repugs are sure they'll win even when they're
>behind.
The very easily demoralized aren't the best salespersons for a tough product to sell.
The worst case scenario is that the AnybodyButNader campaign manages to depress votes for Nader/Camejo and other candidates on the left without winning them for the Democrats and that the AnybodyButBush strategy is not enough to keep the Democratic Party partisans mobilized and fails to win swing voters for Kerry.
> > Try as Ruy Teixeira might to find a positive spin on the polls, there is
>> no denying that Kerry is a lackluster candidate.
>
>I don't think anyone would deny that. He literally makes Gore look
>charismatic.
>
>But he has a 20 year reputation for finishing strong. And he looks
>like he's picking up a bit.
On the other hand, the New York Times, which has been all but officially campaigning for Kerry, put this on the front page:
<blockquote>It was the campaign that seemed to have everything. A rented mainframe computer and a sophisticated telephone voter list when typewriters and index cards were still common. A legion of eager volunteers, including a bike-riding boarding school student named Caroline Kennedy. Plenty of cash, celebrity supporters and a compelling first-time candidate: John Kerry.
But in the end, the 1972 Democratic campaign for Congress in the Fifth District of Massachusetts, stretching from the gritty old mill towns of Lawrence and Lowell to the upscale suburbs of Lexington and Concord, lacked one big thing: voters. Mr. Kerry lost to his Republican opponent in a district George McGovern carried, after a bitter battle in which his antiwar protests were attacked, his patriotism was questioned and he himself was derided as an elitist careerist. His political future seemed shattered before it began.
Months later, a sympathetic profile in The Worcester Telegram summed up Mr. Kerry's predicament on a day he had been doing errands, ran out of gas, then headed to the car wash. "All of a sudden, water started washing over my shoes!" Mr. Kerry explained in the article. "The car was filling up with water! Water was coming out of every orifice! I could see the headlines: 'John Kerry, Former Congressional Candidate, Drowned in Car Wash.' "
The article continued: "Obviously, John Kerry is a loser. Only losers have days like this." And Mr. Kerry himself offered a terse assessment: "How did I feel when I lost? Lousy. I guess you learn from it. I'm not sure just what yet."
Thirty-two years later, Mr. Kerry is once again surrounded by many of the loyalists from that first campaign - the only one he has ever lost. He is once again on the defensive over his Vietnam War service and his antiwar record, once again facing a Republican opponent who mocks him as an out-of-touch elitist, once again fighting to fulfill his campaign's early promise.
So what are the lessons Mr. Kerry learned so long ago? To hit back hard when attacked? To bide his time and ration the early passion that made him such an outspoken opponent of the Vietnam War and such an eloquent, appealing candidate, but also a target of criticism? Perhaps a bit of both. From that election to this, his career has been marked more by cautious calculation than bold strokes, and to a striking degree, his vulnerabilities then remain his vulnerabilities now. (Todd S. Purdum, "John Kerry's Journey: Echoes of a 1972 Loss Haunt a 2004 Campaign," <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/24/politics/campaign/24journey.html">September 24, 2004</a>)</blockquote> -- Yoshie
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