…but I didn’t expect it so soon.
Jake Tapper at ABC has a piece on Kerry dissing the South:
During a town hall meeting on the Dartmouth campus, Kerry noted that former Vice President Al Gore would be president if he’d won any number of other non-Southern states in 2000, including New Hampshire, West Virginia, and Ohio.
“Everybody always makes the mistake of looking South,” Kerry said, in response to a question about winning the region. “Al Gore proved he could have been president of the United States without winning one Southern state, including his own.”
Two things: Kerry is absolutely right and strategically correct. Since he CAN’T win in South Carolina or the South, he needs to prove that he doesn’t need to win there in the first place. Isn’t this smarter than pretending he’s not DOA down South and losing big on February 3rd? Now when he loses to Edwards, he can dismiss it as irrelevant to his national strategy.
Second, on behalf of all Southerners, I want to thank Kerry for taking West Virginia off our hands.