Lively Debate

Well, it looks like bush wins. If you read my political entries, you will know that I supported Bush. I'm glad the election is over, though, one way or the other.

Joi Ito:

For awhile, many of us thought that they had been conned into voting for Bush - that they didn't know he wanted to be a War President. Many people didn't equate the US policies with the people of America.

I've said before that non-americans should be careful not to read too much into politically opportunistic domestic opposition to the war.

The two biggests mistakes of the Bush Campaign:

The premature politically motivated theatrical "mission accomplished" aircraft carrier victory declaration. I think Americans would have been much more tolerant of how the war in iraq was going if Bush hadn't screwed up and said it was over.

The poor performance in the first debate. Fratboy Bush simply didn't do his homework. Kerry had a terrible and confusing position on Iraq and I'm sure the Bush team thought they would wipe the podium with him. However, i listened to a Kerry speech a week before the debate and he seemed to have pulled together his message on Iraq into a coherent whole, obviously in preparation for the debate. Bush came prepared to debate convention time Kerry, not debate the Kerry that showed up.

I think either of these two mistakes alone could have cost Bush the election. That they didn't shows what a poor candidate Kerry was.

The two biggest Democratic campaign mistakes:

The Primary process. The anti-war and "Bush is not my president" base of the party rushed the primary process and picked the wrong candidate. I've been saying that sheer Bush hate was not enough to win an election. You need a vision. Dean's early lead forced Kerry to change his position from pro-war to anti-war and then to some hindsight induced synthesis of the two. The candidates seemed to have a gentleman's agreement not to criticize each other and focus on Bush. To avoid damaging their candidate, they got behind one man too quickly. The liberal base picked a candidate from a region that they had locked up to begin with and who wasn't accustomed to communicating with the church going, gun toting moderates of the american interior. Geographically speaking, and all else being equal in the democratic leaning west coast, northeast and "canadian coast," if Gephardt could have carried his home state of Missouri and tipped the still too close to call neighboring Iowa, there would be a Democratic president now.

The Vietnam, um I mean Democratic convention. Kerry squandered his opportunity to lay out a future vision for America and instead focused on the past, and worst yet took a reactionary opposition party position to Bush. Quick, compare and contrast the Kerry and Bush health care plans for America. Most people don't know anything more than Kerry is for health care. Kerry wasted his opportunity to communicate and set his own agenda for the election.