� How far we've come? | Main | It's not criticism I despise, its conflict journalism �

November 4, 2004

How Michael Moore Lost the Election for Kerry

Surprising conclusion? Let’s follow that up.

I subscribe to a wide range of political magazines, some of which are far left. I like to get sample from a wide range of opinions. That’s why I blog, and read lots of Blogs.

When President Bush made the decision to go into Iraq, I started reading in the far left magazines (Adbusters was the most entertaining) a lot of bogus charges about President Bush:

  • He was invading for the oil.
  • He was invading to make Halliburton more money
  • He was invading because Saddam shot at his daddy
  • He was invading because the big corporations told him to

Meanwhile, in Foreign Affairs, for a year prior to that, I was reading serious articles that boiled down to: “What the hell are we going to do about Iraq with the UN being so corrupt?”. So the real foreign policy mavens didn’t believe that we were going into Iraq because we wanted to, but because we might have to if the UN didn’t pull its head out of its ass. So the conspiracy theories were clearly moonbat nonsense, because Foreign Affairs would have no problem criticizing the President if they thought there was no reason to go into Iraq.

Bush is a sellout to the corporations fit in with a certain far left mindset, so they started repeating it to each other constantly. Because they took it on faith that Bush was Evil, anyone opposed to Bush must be good. So Iraq became the land of butterflies and happiness, Saddam just misunderstood.

However, repeating things doesn’t make it true. If it did, we’d all go around constantly saying I’m rich. In a busy world though, if you hear things enough times from a number of different people, you start to wonder. I did, and I investigated. Basically, while the media can scream all they want about “no-bid” contracts, the reality is that the government has to buy stuff all the time from sole-source providers. So by law, those contracts are limited to somewhere between 2-7% profit over cost. The only way to get 7% is to deliver things ahead of some deadline, and the government reserves the right to “disallow” certain costs, so its actually quite challenging to make money on those sorts of government contracts. In fact, out of $9B in revenues for the Engineering and Construction group in 2003, they ended up losing $36M.

So the Halliburton dog won’t hunt as they say. None of the other stuff I looked into was any more valid then that.

Now none of that would have mattered until Michael Moore came out with his movie which repeated this and some other charges. When he did that, while the more rational left called the movie what it was, a complete distortion, too many people on the moderate left embraced the movie because it was against President Bush, rather then critically evaluating it.

So the moderate left, which could have reasonably criticized the President on a number of fronts, bought into the whole mindset of the far left.

Now Kerry had a chance here to set the direction and tone of the debate. If he had, we might be have a different President in the White House right now.

At some point, Kerry had a chance to tone done the rhetoric from the left. He could have booted Carter and Moore from the convention. He could have found some real things to criticize the President about.

He didn’t do it. In fact, he started embracing those points, probably in an effort to solidify his “base”. That’s the moment he started losing. Something that particularly stands out to me is when he repeated Moore’s “Bush did nothing for 7 minutes” line. It was a stupid, pointless, criticism, made even more pointless when it turned out that Kerry did nothing for 44 minutes.

By embracing the pointless charges of the far left, Kerry made the election about nonsense, and ultimately about Bush. Its an old marketing rule: never mention the competition, because it only helps them. Kerry’s stump speeches were always about Bush, never about Kerry.

And that’s why he lost. Reading a Kerry speech was like listening to hours of reasons why you shouldn’t vote for Bush, but 5 minutes of why you should vote for Kerry. In a weird way, Kerry was campaigning for Bush, because Kerry never really provided himself as an alternative.

One telling example for me was reading both of their position documents. Kerry had a 265 page download that was mostly copies of his stump speeches but no actual “plan”. Bush had a 41 page download that was filled with details.

So ultimately, it was Kerry’s decision to embrace the Michael Moore segment of his supporters and their message that lost him this election. Kerry needed to produce his own message, and he never did.

Posted by the at November 4, 2004 10:21 AM

Trackback Pings

TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.opinionatedbastard.com/mt-tb.cgi/195