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Matt Yglesias breaks down how John Kerry threw down last night:
Six years ago, I helped put together the 30th anniversary issue of the student alt-weekly paper I edited, which gave me the opportunity to familiarize myself with our archives. It was a bit startling to see that the coverage of John Kerry's ultimately failed 1972 campaign for the U.S. House of Representatives already depicted Kerry's ultimate goal as the White House.Kerry's loss in 1972 slowed his political ascent. He went to law school, passed the bar in 1976, and went to work as a prosecutor. In 1982 he became lieutenant governor of Massachusetts. In 1985 he entered the U.S. Senate. By the time he re-emerged on the national stage, in other words, his name had already been bandied about as a potential president for over a decade. In 2004, 32 years after that initial defeat, Kerry ended up both closer and farther than ever, as George W. Bush narrowly secured re-election. Not only did Kerry lose, but he did so in a particularly dispiriting manner, running amid a controversial and failing war without anything resembling a clear message on it. To some extent, he was merely the victim of circumstances, but it was infuriating for liberals to spend months backing a candidate who would neither denounce the decision to begin the war nor call for its end, all in the name of the higher cause of beating Bush, only to see Bush win anyway.
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—The Editors
