461 Kerry the Politician

Brendan Miniter says Kerry will lose because he isn’t a very good politician. I wouldn’t count on that. The hatred for Bush is palpable even for people who don’t particularly like or support Kerry. Here’s what Miniter wrote in the September 7 Wall Street Journal.

“Mr. Kerry's problem is much worse than having phoned it in for 20 years in the Senate. Somehow he has built a political career without ever developing the skill of connecting with people or being able to read the pulse of the electorate. In the 1980s, he opposed nearly every new weapons system the Reagan administration rolled out. In the 1990s he fought to slash intelligence funding. Both look like clear mistakes now. On Vietnam, he misread how the electorate would react to his antiwar record. Some Democrats actually argued Mr. Kerry would be popular among veterans. So Mr. Kerry thought he was giving voters what they wanted to hear when he responded to the GOP convention by getting on TV at midnight to talk about Vietnam and whine about imagined attacks on his patriotism. Democrats politely say that he's not very charismatic, but the truth is that he's like a tone-deaf musician who stumbles into a gig at Carnegie Hall and can't understand why the crowd doesn't cheer.”

Full editorial here. [Unlike the New York Times, the WSJ doesn’t try to pass of editorial opinion as “news.”]