John Kerry’s brand of Boston diplomacy pays off

[karynnj]

34. Not super powers

1) I simply said that she MIGHT have accurately described in her book the words she heard - and noted that the meaning might have been more innocuous. This was stated as CONJECTURE. However, there are people close to Kerry who deny that Edwards made any case to Kerry not to concede. So, at best, you can claim that you believe the Edwards over the Kerry people. I suggest that the fact that the Edwards never ever indicated what the basis for their fight would have been, backs what the Kerry team said.

2) As to what she knew the next day - the Edwards clearly were told by the Democratic election lawyers the same thing that the entire Kerry team was told -- there was no viable case. There were not enough outstanding votes in Ohio to count. (This was later seen to be accurate as there was still a large gap (I think about 16,000) after all the absentee and provisional ballots were counted.) Not to mention, I think her own mind had far bigger, more important things to deal with the next day - as she went for tests at the hospital.

3) I agree that I am speculating as to why she said what she did in Iowa. I also - forced by you - listed other instances where she put out clearly politically motivated comments and that she - in some - was very willing to be revisionist.

The fact still remains that no one has successfully disputed what the Democratic lawyers and later Cam Kerry said was the case back in November 2004 -- there were not enough votes for Kerry cast in Ohio. Even the RFKjr analysis simply proved that Kerry would have won an honest election in Ohio. He ESTIMATED the votes lost to too few machines and other voter suppression tricks. Yes, I remember the caterpillar ballots, where they differed by district and clearly some ended up being tabulated in a different district - either because people used the wrong ballot or because they were switched. The proof it happened were that there were "ghost peaks" of votes to really minor candidates positioned where Kerry was in the next district. However, where a statistician doing a study can and should "correct" obvious errors in the data, this is not what can legally be done after an election. Consider in the well known Palm Beach 2000 case, that it would have very easy - if this were just a study - to know that the ballots for both Buchanan and Gore coming from retirement villages that were actually i almost 100% Jewish were intended to be votes for Gore/Lieberman. However, that is not what the law is.

When this was raised in 2007, it was just one of the desperate pandering attempts to make Edwards the candidate of the left -- and all of this was seen daily on DU.