Hillary Clinton, like all human beings, suffers from some flaws. Similarly, John Kerry, her successor as secretary of state and likely predecessor as Democratic Party presidential nominee, suffers from some flaws. But when people suggest that Clinton's flaws remind them of Kerry in a way that makes them frightened about the outcome of the 2016 general election, they are simply misremembering what happened in 2004.
A plugged-in Democrat just told me he's getting the same sinking feeling he had when John Kerry was the nominee http://t.co/eC8blYdbl9
— Taegan Goddard (@politicalwire) April 23, 2015
Purge your mind of everything you think you know about John Kerry. Picture a tall man with a deep voice who is 61 years of age. Add that the man in question is a veteran senator from a blue state, who was known for sometimes frustrating his home-state base by not being quite as liberal as they would like. Note that the man in question is a decorated war hero who later — at a very young age — became an iconic leader of activism against what had become an unpopular war.
Sounds like a pretty strong nominee, right?
John Kerry outperformed the fundamentals
Now grok this chart from John Sides and Lynn Vavreck's excellent political science book on the 2012 election, The Gamble:
It shows, historically speaking, the relationship between economic growth and incumbent party presidential performance. It also shows a few things you might find intuitive. Democrats underperformed the fundamentals in 1972 when their nominee was perceived as so left-wing that he couldn't even secure the clear support of the AFL-CIO. But Democrats overperformed the fundamentals in 1964 when the GOP nominated an extremist.
You also see here that in 2004, George W. Bush's reelection campaign did somewhat worse than you would have expected given the decent economy at the time.
That's because John Kerry — tall, handsome, experienced, war hero — was a good candidate who ran a good campaign.
Of course, there are other election models out there besides the one Sides and Vavrek use. But they generally say the same thing. Doug Hibbs's "bread and peace" model seeks to explicitly account for the negative impact on public opinion of military casualties, and it also says Kerry outperformed the fundamentals.
Why Democrats misremember John Kerry
At the end of the day, any nominee who loses is at risk of being remembered as a "bad candidate." But Kerry suffers from two specific problems that lead Democrats to misremember him as a bad candidate.
One is that Democrats really hated George W. Bush and felt he should have been easy to beat. After all, in 2000 more people had voted for Al Gore than voted for Bush, and a nontrivial share of the public voted for Ralph Nader. Four years in office had done nothing but vindicate Bush's critics, so why wouldn't 2004 be an easy win? That built-in presupposition that Bush was a loser was unwarranted — the fact of the matter is that incumbents normally get reelected — but it exerted a powerful pull on the Democratic psyche.
The other is that lots of activist liberals never really liked Kerry in the first place. Old-line labor Democrats looked to Dick Gephardt as a champion for their issues and a standard-bearer for populist economics throughout the neoliberalism of the Clinton years. And, of course, anti-war Democrats looked to Howard Dean. Ultimately, electability rather than enthusiasm per se was a key consideration for many who backed Kerry. As a bumper sticker from the winter of 2003-'04 put it, "Dated Dean, Married Kerry."
As the boring, sensible dude you settle for, it was very frustrating to see Kerry go out and lose. A more liberal candidate who'd opposed the invasion of Iraq from the beginning and ran on an ambitious platform of universal single-payer health care probably would have lost, too, but would have at least gone down fighting the good fight. But Kerry ran a cautious campaign in hopes of winning against the odds, and while he did in fact beat the odds, he did not win.
That's a classic feel-bad story, and it's understandable that it soured a lot of people on him. But don't confuse that with John Kerry being a bad candidate or a bad politician.
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