Democratic Party presidential candidate Joe Biden is making the same mistake that John Kerry made in 2004 during his confrontation with George Bush.
This is reported by The New York Times.
Donald Trump has made many mistakes in recent years, but it is a profound mistake to think that this factor is a guarantee of defeat in elections. In particular, this is what Joe Biden is trying to use.
In this regard, the publication reminds how the 2004 presidential race was unfolding. George Bush was on the one hand and John Kerry on the other. The war in Iraq was not the best background for Bush’s election campaign. In 2003, 30-40 American soldiers died each month, and by the end of the year the mortality rate had reached the level of World War II, despite the fact that Saddam Hussein was already in captivity.
The year 2004 was marked by new losses of the American army. In April, 131 soldiers were killed. Since then and until election day, the U.S. Army’s losses have ranged from 50 to more than 70 per month.
Eighteen months of bad news painted an unfortunate picture for Bush. Early polls showed that Kerry was in the lead. However, Bush won with 50.7% of the vote against 48.3%.
“Even if we had known by then that Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction or clear ties to any of the 9/11 hijackers, the administration increasingly justified the Iraqi mission as part of a broader program of democracy and freedom. And there was no Iraq without any encouraging signs that could have been trumpeted in the political campaign”, – the article notes.
John Kerry was able to do better in Iraq, the paper believes. However, that was not what the American voter was interested in in 2004. Similarly, now citizens are not interested in what Joe Biden would have done during the Coronavirus epidemic.
“Disputes about the past are a fair political game, but they are rarely convincing in the midst of a crisis”, – writes the NYT.
The publication stresses that Americans are interested in their future, not their mistakes already made. That’s what will ruin Joe Biden, who clings so persistently to the failures of his opponent.