In literally all of the campaign cycles of my lifetime, the candidate who comes up short effectively disappears. None of them, however, had a Senate seat to go back to after the election was over.
With this in mind, John Kerry plan to use his stature and national standing to do what he’s been doing for most of the last year — challenging George W. Bush.
Kerry will attend a post-election lame-duck Senate session that begins next week and has said he is “fired up” to play a highly visible role, the friends and aides said.
Aides said Kerry is relishing the prospect of renewed combat with President Bush, fighting such measures as the president’s proposal to open the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil drilling. Kerry has spent most of the past two years on the campaign trail, meaning that his return to Capitol Hill will be something of a reintroduction to colleagues.
Kerry’s plans contrast starkly with the approach taken by former vice president Al Gore, who all but disappeared from the political scene after losing to Bush in the disputed 2000 presidential election.
So far, so good. Kerry should use his position to be a leading national Democrat. There’s no reason for him to slink away into obscurity. Nearly 56 million people chose him to lead the country and, with a 1% shift in Ohio, he’d be writing his inaugural speech and picking out a cabinet right now.
That does not mean, however, that he should run for president again.
It’s great that Kerry isn’t taking the results too hard, but gearing up for another campaign strikes me as a mistake.
Less than a week after conceding defeat to President Bush, Sen. John F. Kerry is calling key Democratic donors to lay the groundwork for a political organization that would give him a voice in national politics and position him for another White House run in 2008, close associates say.
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“There’s a tradition,” [Robert Farmer, Kerry’s campaign treasurer] said. “Nixon ran and lost and then won, Reagan ran and lost, then won. In this case, you’ll have to look at the field and say to yourself, ‘Could another candidate have won states that John Kerry didn’t win?’ And my sense is that I don’t think anybody could have done much better than John Kerry did.”
This is a bit of a stretch. Only one candidate in the last century — Richard Nixon — has ever run for president as a party nominee, lost, and then come back to win. One other candidate — Adlai Stevenson — successfully won his party’s nomination twice, but lost both times. I’d hardly call this “a tradition.”
Generally speaking, you get one shot at the ring. Some were willing to make an exception for Al Gore going into this year’s campaign cycle, but that was only because he sort-of won the last time and got robbed. And even he decided to step aside.
There are competing schools of thought about how the Dems should proceed in the coming years, but those advocating “Kerry — The Sequel” are a very small minority.
Another Democrat involved in Kerry’s campaign strategy — who also spoke on the condition of anonymity, in order to be more candid — said: “I can’t imagine people are going to say, ‘It worked pretty well last time. This is what we need next time.'”
I don’t expect or want Kerry to fade away and give up. He’s a terrific senator, an aggressive fighter for a more progressive America, and would have been a fine president. But when it comes to ’08, Dems don’t need a repeat.