Quote:
Originally posted by: #1MavsFan
Wow, lol... Lets only put the minority of Iraqis who support the election in the media. A anti american goverment will come to power, and Kerry was dead on today.
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Transcript
MR. RUSSERT: Let me show you a photograph from Inauguration Day. Here is George W. Bush giving his second inaugural address. And there watching is John Kerry.
SEN. KERRY: I was in the wrong seat there, wasn't I?
MR. RUSSERT: What was going through your mind at that moment on that morning?
SEN. KERRY: Respect for the process,
not feeling sorry for myself at all. I mean, look, I think we waged a great campaign. Did we make some mistakes? You bet we did. I take responsibility for them. You know, I am the person in charge, my campaign, I am responsible. I am not going to sit around worrying about what we did or didn't do. But we did some unbelievable things. We raised more money than any Democratic campaign in history. We involved more volunteers than any campaign in history. I won more votes than any candidate on the Democratic side has ever won in history. I lost, Tim, to an incumbent president by a closer margin than an incumbent president has ever won re-election before in the history of the country, and if you add up the popular vote in the battleground states, I won the popular vote in the battleground states by two percentage points. We just didn't distribute it correctly in Ohio.
So I think we did a great job, and we are going to continue to build on that campaign as I am now with my Kids First health plan. We have over 400,000 co-sponsors through the Internet who want to fight for this, and we are going to fight for it.
MR. RUSSERT: At the Clinton Library dedication on November 18, a few weeks after the election, you were quoted as saying, "It was the Osama bin Laden tape. It scared the voters," the tape that appeared just a day before the election here. Do you believe that tape is the reason you lost the race?
SEN. KERRY: I believe that 9/11 was the central deciding issue in this race. And the tape--we were rising in the polls up until the last day when the tape appeared. We flat-lined the day the tape appeared and went down on Monday. I think it had an impact. But 9/11, you know, it's a very difficult hurdle when a country is at war. I applauded the president's leadership in the days immediately afterwards. I thought he did a good job in that, and he obviously connected to the American people in those immediate days. When a country is at war and in the wake of 9/11, it's very difficult to shift horses in midstream. I think it's remarkable we came as close as we did as a campaign. Many Republicans say we beat their models by four or five points as to what they thought we could achieve.
I am proud of the campaign, Tim. And I think if you look at what we did in states, I mean, millions of new voters came into this process. I won the youth vote. I won the independent vote. I won the moderate vote.
If you take half the people at an Ohio State football game on Saturday afternoon and
they were to have voted the other way, you and I would be having a discussion today about my State of the Union speech.
MR. RUSSERT: And the president will say if he had half the people at a high school basketball game in New Hampshire or Oregon, he would have carried those states because he lost them by 5,000 or 7,000.
SEN. KERRY: Well, the point is--that's right, and that's the difference. That the difference in this race was 18 electoral votes, 50,000, 60,000 people changing their votes in one state. That is a mandate for unity, not a mandate to go rushing off to change Social Security, not a mandate to ignore the fiscal crisis of our country, not a mandate to sort of pick some ideological hot buttons and start punching them. It is a mandate, as I said in my concession speech, to bring the country together, find the common ground and do things that we need to do to strengthen America. And there is a long list of those things.
MR. RUSSERT: But you voted against Condoleezza Rice to be secretary of state. That's not finding common ground.
She is qualified to hold that job, no?
SEN. KERRY:
Yes , and I said so. But I also said that she was a principal architect, implementer and defender of a policy that has made the United States of America less secure in the world. And that was a fight that was central to my campaign. It is central to what I think is one of the major issues that faces our country. And I think it's important to have accountability. I paid her a great tribute for her journey of life. I mean, I think she's a remarkable person. And I think she's obviously accomplished a great deal.
But I wasn't voting on whether she was just qualified. I was voting on the judgments that she brought to the table. I was voting on the answers that she gave us in committee. And I was voting on the vision that she offered to the country. And I found all three, frankly, faulty.
John Kerry is a vagina.