Question about weak candidates.

[Ken Burch]

115. I'd say the campaigns of the first three had significant weaknesses as well.

(For the record, I don't personally think Hillary was a "weak candidate"-just that a very questionable campaign was run on her behalf. It isn't always about personally maligning a candidate)

Gore had spent the previous fifteen years fighting to marginalize the progressive wing of the party, and was then unable to understand why a lot of progressives couldn't bring themselves to support him in 2000(and yes, I say that acknowledging he WOULD have been better than Bush). He sounded passionless and obsessively "safe", and he spent too much time trying to blur the differences between himself and Bush.

Kerry's campaign had known that he'd be attacked by bitter-end Vietnam War apologists even before he declared, and they never ever prepared for the attack(if they had, they could have beaten it back simply by getting ahead of the story).in

Carter, while one of the most personally decent people ever to hold the presidency, let himself be fatally constrained by conventional wisdom politics...he inadvertently helped cause the Iranian hostage situation by defending the Shah to the bitter end and he gave Reagan the "misery index" by taking conservative advice to make low inflation(rather than full employment)the major economic priority of his administration. And he needlessly alienated progressive by making no proposals to restore any of Nixon or Ford's cuts to social services.

All had their flaws.

I don't think you'll find many people here who think Hillary was the only problematic candidate we've ever nominated, OR that the main issue was her gender. I'm convinced that the only people who had an issue with that were people who would never have voted for ANY Democrat.