"The Last Man to Concede..."

I'm not agreeing or disagreeing with the article-- but I am curious as to what others think.

Sheila Samples: 'The last man to concede...'

By Sheila Samples

On November 3, just hours after Democratic vice-presidential hopeful John Edwards made a national announcement that he and John Kerry were not going to concede until all the votes were counted, Kerry grabbed the spotlight and conceded -- before all the votes were counted.

Kerry took the money and ran. Seems he couldn't stick around because he and the missus were spending Christmas at a holiday extravaganza in Sun Valley as personal guests of California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, who just weeks before had fired up the Republican Convention at Madison Square Garden by declaring that "America is safer with George W. Bush as president."

According to the San Francisco Chronicle (http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2005/01/06/DDGAB9AA831.DTL), "The former candidate, largely AWOL post-election, was seen in intense conversation with Dennis Miller."

It would be another two months before Kerry got around to emailing his millions of stunned, exhausted, and much poorer supporters to let them know that, although he was committed to "ensuring that every vote in this election is counted," alas, he wouldn't be joining the protest of the Ohio Electors.


http://www.smirkingchimp.com/article.php?sid=19452&mode=nested&order=0

-- alley for the rats to gnaw on.

His detractors earn their criticism of Kerry when their own lifetimes of public service match his.

Not until.

The article, I thought, was pretty harsh...

His detractors earn their criticism when he surrenders the main thing democrats have been working for the past 4 years. Screw his public service. He betrayed me.

I'm disappointed in the outcome of the election.

I'm not willing to permit my disappointment to prompt a dismissal of one person.

Any ad hominem attacks are automatically invalid, but there are truths though such as him disappearing for a good two months after the election or his stand-offish position on the recounts. He wouldn't get involved until weeks later. Conyers, as well as a rag-tag coalition of Libertarians and Greens (of all coalitions to be formed!), was doing all the grunt work, and that's a bright spot in a bleak picture.

In some way, I understood he may have done it to avoid being labeled a sore loser and repeating Florida 2000, but another part of me wishes he could have at least done just a bit more. I'm not saying he should have jumped into the middle of the recount war but just something a little bit more is all.

I'm still kicking around him being conveniently out of the country during the certification of electors. I don't know how to react to that.

primarily for his lack of populist platform.

In my opinion, Kerry was hand-picked by the DLC, which leads me to believe there is more to this than what appears on the surface (as there so often is).

At the very least, Kerry fell ill with the 'DLC Syndrome', a disease which is having the effect of terminating the democratic party in lieu of something just a hair to the left of neoconservative fascism, which really disturbs me.

And it's things like this (Kerry staying with Gov. Terminator, Kerry leaving the country during certification, Kerry NOT providing any opposition) that bother me about him.

Just my two cents.