Michael Moore was the person most hated by the Bush WH,

[Ken Burch]

15. That's because OUR ticket in 2004 SUPPORTED everything Moore's film called out.

Our guys were pro-Patriot Act, pro "Homeland Security uber alles" and pro-war(with the meaningless qualifier of "nuance", whatever the hell THAT ever meant), which meant we had no way of GETTING the voters that film mobilized(most of them backed us anyway, even though we gave them no reason to). Kerry and Edwards didn't CHALLENGE Bush on any foreign policy issue that meant anything-Kerry reduced his pitch to "we'll do the same shit globally, but we'll be nicer about it and I'll bring Peter Yarrow along for the press conference when I announce more bombing in Iraq". We had a massive national swing against the war happening, but our party refused to appeal to that swing, and gained no votes anywhere from anybody who still backed the damn war, because only the right-wing still backed it by then.

We gave the voters no reason to think that defeating Bush and Cheney would actually change anything. When you don't challenge the policies of the status quo, you can't BEAT the people who created it.

The 2004 result proved, forever, that "we can do it better" can NEVER work for Democratic challengers to a Republican president. Which won't stop our party's strategists from doing it over and over, because those "strategists" don't really care if we elect Democratic presidents or not, as they proved in the Eighties when they refused to even try to beat Reagan or Bush the Elder.