re: #268 Sol Berdinowitz

The smear campaign against Kerry worked wonderfully well in 2004, since Kerry was the kind of guy nobody really liked, even those who supported his politics and his party.

Obama had a sort of opposite effect, aside from a minority of rabid racists, a lot of people admired Obama as a nice guys, as someone who really did embody the American dream.

But since many of those mouth-breathers controlled policy making in the GOP, they did not think to change tactics. The smear tactcs bounced off him like the old rubber-and-glue analogy.

Kerry did get tarred, but he’d earned some of the tar since his actions after he got home from Vietnam were problematic. And to bring in an analogy to Les Miserables (one I actually made back in 2004), John O’Neill made an excellent Javert, having been hostile to Kerry for decades but still appearing calm and collected in public. I saw O’Neill speak in October of that year and he had none of the panicky shrillness that characterizes so many Birthers. He came across a veteran who had felt slandered and had set out to redress the record. That wasn’t wholly true, I now know, but it was how he presented himself.

Kerry also had some notable gaffes, such as his hunting trip (which only made him look clueless and out of touch) and his campaign assumed far too much about how it thought the election would go down, which allowed Kerry to be blind to the power of Karl Rove’s turnout machine.

Barack Obama, by contrast, assumed less than Kerry in both 2008 and 2012 and worked hard on nailing down his win. Obama is also able to interact with the public on their level and present himself as one of them, which neither Kerry nor his fellow rich guy from Massachusetts Mitt Romney were able to do. Obama also benefited from having a much lower caliber of accuser, with the calm-but aggrieved-seeming O’Neill being replaced by the hysterical and clueless Orly Taitz.