Kerry: There He Goes Again

A good deal of attention has been devoted to Kerry’s characteristically off key comments on Meet The Press yesterday — his warning not to “overhype” the election or “to say that something is legitimate when a whole portion of the country can’t vote and doesn’t vote.” But those weren’t his only, well, odd observations.

For example, there was his dependence on/rejection of polls.

KERRY: I believe that 9/11 was the central deciding issue in this race. And the [Osama] 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.

And, a few paragraphs later:

KERRY: Well, Tim, if you ask me about polls today, you’re going to get one of the sort of quick and easy dismissals of all politics, because I’m a poll expert. And if you’ll recall, every poll in the country eliminated me from the race in December prior to Iowa, and I turned around and won. And every poll eliminated me two or three times from even making the race close.

So I think polls today are almost irrelevant, and I just don’t pay any attention to them.

“I voted for polls … before I voted against them.” Or something.

And then there was his very odd reduction of the country to the battleground states. Consider:

… if you add up the popular vote in the battleground states, I won the popular vote in the battleground states by 2 percentage points. We just didn’t distribute it correctly in Ohio.

And how does Kerry reply to critics who are angry that his campaign wound up with a $14 million surplus? As quoted in an article in today’s Washington Post:

Some critics said it was a sign of poor planning that he finished the campaign with a surplus, but Kerry said that his battleground-state campaigns got all the money they needed.

We knew that many Democrats want to dump the electoral college in favor of a popular vote, but we always thought they’d at least be willing to count the votes in all 50 states.