Newsweek's Evan Thomas on John Kerry

Last night I attended a panel with Martin Nolan of the Boston Globe and Evan Thomas of Newsweek. Evan Thomas told us a little bit about covering the Kerry campaign. He was allowed a great deal of access with the promise that he would not print what he saw until after the election. Here are some of the highlights:

• Kerry's campaign was very disorganized. By comparison, Bush's ran like a well-oiled machine. Kerry's campaign was also very slow, it took them three weeks to respond to the Swift Vote veterans and by then the damage was already done.
• Kerry was extremely indecisive. He would agonize over every decision for a long time, and sometimes after making a decision he would call his staff on his cell phone to reconsider.
• Kerry never really found a comfortable voice. Ironically, the most authentic sounding speech he gave was his concession speech. His rhetoric was trying to sound too much like John F. Kennedy but it just didn't work.

I voted for Kerry, but I think there is a significant chance he could have been even worse than President Bush. Political campaigns are in someways the only real way a voter can test a candidates leadership skills. As a Senator, Kerry has no executive duties and does not have to run anything except his own office of about 50 people. To some extent, being able to run a political campaign is at least some kind of test of minimal competence. Perhaps. Or maybe Bush was just lucky to have a such a brilliant strategist such as Karl Rove. If the rest of his advisors were as talented in their fields as Rove is in politics, than Bush would be the greatest president since FDR. But alas, that is not the case.