That’s because he didn’t land on an carrier underneath a mission accomplished banner.
People are demonizing him like he was trying to do a bad job. He just sucked at being the president. He never should have even been in the running. It was a case of “right place, right time” and good marketing.
It was like someone doing a forklifting job without having any training. Bad news, and dangerous.
It was a case of “right place, right time” and good marketing.
Twice, apparently, since he was re-elected. I’m still incredulous over that.
Personally, I demonize him because he singlehandedly did more to run our country in a direction I find appalling, immoral, and stupid than several years of the Contract With America crowd or voodoo economics.
Feel free to keep waving those hands of yours just as hard as you can, though, Jon.
Kerry was not a great candidate. If Gore had run… things probably would have been different. (Maybe even worse though… Bush had some awesome campaign strategies that totally destroyed Kerry)
Kerry was not a great candidate.
It really shouldn’t have mattered. A house plant should have beaten him at that point.
As someone who promoted “finishing the job” seven years ago here, let me tell you, George Bush the First made the right call.
But the house plant would have swift boat captains and crew coming out of the woodwork to say how bad he was as a leader in Vietnam.
The Iraq War was never about “Finishing the job.” “The job” was finished in 1991, because our only interest and our only objective was keeping Saddam off our oil. Even the embargo and the no-fly zones were completely unnecessary. All they did was provide a distraction for American public when Clinton felt like bombing some brown people, and cause a tremendous amount of death and suffering amongst Iraq’s civilians.
“Finishing the Job”.
How’d that work out anyway?
I thought he lost due to the tax increases?
Lucky(?) for Dubya and and unlucky for New Orleans, Katrina happened in 2005, not 2004.
IIRC, the sole objective of the first Gulf War was to drive Iraq out of Kuwait. We did that - though not before Saddam set fire to the Kuwaiti oil wells, so not quite a flawless victory - so by definition, we won that war. Clearly, though, there are those who thought we should or were going to depose Saddam, so the sequel was a chance to wrap up those loose plot threads. Unfortunately, as is often the case, the sequel wasn’t anywhere near as good as the original.
And yet the Bush campaign managed to make Kerry look less appealing than a house plant to the majority of American voters.
That takes some serious bad mojo to pull off.
And yet the Bush campaign managed to make Kerry look less appealing than a house plant to the majority of American voters.
That takes some serious bad mojo to pull off.
I think the democrats in this country were still asleep at that point. It took another 4 years of abuse and Obama to finally wake them up and get them out of the house to vote. Let’s hope they’re all still awake in 2012.
I think it took considerably less than that, but we still had three and a half years remaining on the contract.
The last three months was perhaps the most excruciating - when even Bush himself seemed to just want to pack out already.
A lot of factors contributed to his loss. The “Read my Lips” thing was a handy way for Clinton to make him look like a liar and after he was defeated it made for a nice board with a nail in it for the anti-tax goons to scare the GOP with.
But his slow reaction to Hurricane Andrew was viewed as a major domestic failure for Poppy.
Ross Perot was a way bigger factor in Bush I’s loss than either “Reid my lips” or Andrew.
That would be why my post begins with the qualifying “A lot of factors” but I agree with you.
Just saying for an administration that had as one of its guiding principles to not do anything Poppy ever did, it was a glaring oversight.
But to continue a theme, why did you spell it “Reid” (in scare quotes)?
That’s ridiculous. There were huge financial windfalls for every one of his policy decisions.
He was very good at being president for a very small minority who were willing to spend a lot of money to make sure that he stayed president for all eight years.
More like the second act is the most depressing. : /
This is out there still, but it’s not obviously true.
A detailed analysis of the voting demographics revealed that Perot’s support drew heavily from across the political spectrum, with 20% of his votes coming from self-described liberals, 27% from self-described conservatives, and 53% coming from self-described moderates. Economically, however, the majority of Perot voters (57%) were middle class, earning between $15,000 and $49,000 annually, with the bulk of the remainder drawing from the upper middle class (29% earning over $50,000 annually).[20] Exit polls also showed that Ross Perot drew 38% of his vote from Bush, and 38% of his vote from Clinton, while the rest of his voters would have stayed home in his absence on the ballot[21].
Maybe there’s a more complicated explanation where he somehow took it out of Bush, but the general polling doesn’t show it.
Wow, that’s weird. I was very tired and I think was alt-tabbing back and forth and reading an article where Harry Reid was mentioned.