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Edited on Fri May-13-05 08:49 AM by karynnj
What seems very strange to me is that this time last cycle, the conventional wisdom was that if Gore wanted to run again, he not only COULD, but he deserved another chance because he had actually won (or at minimum came very close).
My guess is that although, Gore didn't have an uncontested primary, the Bradley supporters genuinely supported Gore after Bradley conceded. The Bradley supporters were mainstream, rational and adult and they saw Gore as the rightful nominee and the primaries as very normal politics.
Last year, there was an open primary. Dean (along with Kuchinich) was supported by the angriest part of the left, many of whom I suspect were not previously involved in normal electoral politics. Their anger over the war and the theft of the Presidency motivated them, so Dean became almost more a "cause" than a "candidate". Dean, who showed his anger and spoke of taking back America, was a leader for them. In fact, I wonder if they led Dean (causing him to act and sound very different than the relatively moderate/conservative Democrat he was as Governor) or whether he created a message to attract them and they were drawn to him by it. But I think this led them to their idea that Dean was liberal and not a politician, while Kerry was a standard run of the mill DLC Washington politician - and they were unwilling to process anything they read or hear contrary to these images.
When Dean and his followers failed to win enough Iowans, due to failures in their own campaign and of their candidate, an angry subset of them blamed everyone but themselves. Compared to Kerry they had all the advantages - Gore's and Harkin's endorsements, a period of fawning press coverage, and more money than anyone; Kerry was dealing with financial problems, very little press coverage other than discussions of when he would give up, and he was dealing with having cancer. Kerry was lucky that Rassman surfaced shortly before the primary, but the quiet work of meeting with people and convincing them that he could be President created his win. (Kerry was also probably helped because Dean yelled at an older guy who was asking (annoying) questions to sit down and whined on TV that he didn't like being a pin cushion.)
As Kerry beat Dean, this subset turned their anger to Kerry, dreaming up ways in which he was unfair to Dean. They still insist that he fought harder and dirtier against Dean than against Bush - which is ludicrous. (In fact, he talked far more about himself in the primary than about all the others combined. He DID spend a lot of time talking about the wrong direction Bush was leading the country in.) They then said they were "holding their noses and voting for Kerry" to get rid of Bush.
When this failed, they, already hating him for the sin of not conceding the primaries to Dean, the only candidate who could win, blamed Kerry for losing to Bush, the worst President ever. There is always a natural tendency for people to hang with people who are like them, so there are the often cited "How could he win, everyone I know (in Manhattan (or I wish it would have been(rural Texas)) voted against him. The INTERNET further exasperates this as even extremely small minorities can find a group of like souls and then hypothesize that they represent a much larger universe than they do. Kos and Co have attracted a lot of this Dean subset. They talk to each other, find they all really didn't like Kerry - and then say no one in the Democratic party liked Kerry (except maybe his family).
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