I wouldn’t call someone dumbass just because he/she got bad or moderate grades in university.

Or at least I wouldn’t call someone intellectual based on good grades.

I’d call them both dumbasses if they got straight A’s at Yale.

I think Kerry studied at Yale before his Vietnam years. He went to law school somewhere else after Vietnam and that’s when he had changed to become a more serious and studious type.

Kerry and Bush may have been equally talented at Yale. Kerry has been reading all sorts of stuff for decades after that, whereas Bush has counted on having bright people around him. Kerry knew that he would have to make the tough decisions if he would be elected President, Bush doesn’t have to worry because he can always ask Cheney.

“I???d call them both dumbasses if they got straight A???s at Yale.”

My point exactly.

It depends on what dumb means. Bush can’t be dumb, I mean he is The Most Powerful Man in The World. If you’re dumb, you wouldn’t got that kind of position. Well of course he’s stupid…

Bush’s scholastic records were public knowledge before the election… and he still won.

Bush could very well be The Most Connected Man in the world. Kerry has always been more of a loner, having hard time in building alliances.

I wouldn’t call him a loner: that sounds too kind. He introduced 8 pieces of major legislation in his 20-odd years of Senate service. The guy is a mediocrity. If he is a loner, it’s simply because he’s such a follower of trends that nobody paid attention to him.

Kerry’s senate record may pale when compared with Ted Kennedy’s but that wouldn’t have made Kennedy a better candidate in 2004. Kerry’s problem for two decades was living in the shadow of the senior senator from Massachusetts. If anyone has better connections than Bush, then it’s Ted Kennedy. The campaign for presidency was the first time Kennedy was wholeheartedly supporting Kerry in something that had to do with domestic policy. Kerry had to profile as a foreign-policy senator where he could work in peace; he had always been a dangerous pretender to the Kennedy camp.

Kerry had a better foreign-policy record than George W. Bush had in 2000. But he wasn’t running against the 2000 Bush, his opponent was the incumbent 2004 Bush. The Kerry campaign did a relatively good job against a wartime incumbent. The alliances built by that campaign to win the primaries and make a competitive run for the presidency were there. Ted Kennedy did all he could to help the loner Kerry, the outsider, to become the given candidate of mainstream Democrats. But had Kennedy seen in Kerry an ally rather than a rival earlier on, he could have helped Kerry to build those inside alliances and networks that are such a trademark of US political ?©lites like the Clintons and the Bushes. It’s probably a good thing for Kerry that he wasn’t adopted by the Kennedy Clan the way Dick Cheney has been adopted by the Bush Clan. He found his way to the Heinz Clan, after all.

To straighten out my rather confusing message – Ted Kennedy was building alliances for Kerry and the Kennedy political machine helped to build the Kerry 2004 campaign, especially in the Democratic primaries. But for two decades before that, Kerry did not have access to Kennedy in the way many senators from other states had.

Kerry’s campaign a good job? It was botched from the beginning, with a total lack of focus. Reactionary politics rarely wins in the end. New, innovative ideas are what the electorate wants to hear from someone taking on an incumbent. Kerry simply didn’t provide any such ideas (or, didn’t have the talent to pick the winning ones from the plethora that are always on offer).

Kerry’s campaign did a good job in the Democratic primaries. There was a lack of focus six months before the primaries, many people predicting that Wesley Clark’s candidacy would mean Kerry finishing third after Dean and Edwards. The Dean campaign imploded, whereas the Kerry campaign had its finest moments during the primary season and until the convention season.

As long as Kerry was coming from behind, he was a good candidate. When he was leading Bush in the polls, the campaign lost focus again and the message was muddled. Some of it was Kerry’s own fault for not daring enough and a part of it was the character demolition job done by the Swift Boat Veterans for the Truth, some of them same people who were responsible for a similar character assassination against John McCain in the Republican primaries four years earlier. That character assassination would not have worked if Kerry had chosen something else than his Vietnam record as his main theme. Still, Kerry did a good job in all of the blue states and his campaign succeeded in urban Ohio in exactly the way his team had calculated, which is why on Election Day Kerry thought he was going to win. His campaign fatally miscalculated the turnout in rural Ohio. It was a close election and certainly no cakewalk for the incumbent George W. Bush.