It’s hard to imagine what it must have been like to be John Kerry on election night in 2004.
For a few hours on Election Day, exit polls indicated that Mr. Kerry would be the victor, but he needed 59,000 voters to go his way in Ohio (he lost by more than three million votes nationwide) and returned to the Senate tagged with the reputation of a liberal, highly partisan loner. He was largely missing from major action on Capitol Hill for the next few years.
Mr. Kerry, 67, disputes that narrative by saying that he was busy as the chairman of the Senate Small Business Committee, but that few paid attention. “I wasn’t going to sit around and mope,” he said. Still, he acknowledges how difficult it was to come back.
“I was 59,000 votes and one state from being able to put an agenda in front of the country,” he said. “And you know for three or four hours we thought it was done.” So, he said, “you go from that expectation of beginning to think about what you’re going to say to the country to suddenly coming back to the Senate and having to sort of walk a careful line, and not being the nominee, and no pretense about leadership.”
I am still highly suspicious that Kerry was robbed in Ohio, and perhaps elsewhere. I think he probably agrees. And even if he wasn’t robbed by electronic means, Secretary of State Ken Blackwell robbed him by placing too few voting machines in urban areas and college towns.
Maybe he can console himself by replacing Hillary in a second Obama term.
