Reply #5: These are at least fair choices

[Tom Rinaldo]

However sometimes you walk into the ice cream store with enough money for just one scoop, though several flavors are appealing. None of our candidates were perfect, though for me Clark came closest, which is why I backed him, but I can admit that Clark would have made an even better candidate if he had more experience at being one under his belt prior to running last time.

So we could do a poll like this for all of our last batch of candidates, and people will never agree because we see them differently and because there are always "wild card" factors like the media's coverage which we may not all view the same either.

Dean was always in my top three candidates. I went back and forth between him and Kerry for second place behind Clark. I liked Dean's fire, I liked his clarity about the Iraq mistake. I liked his following though I got into online "fights" with some. I thought Kerry had, you know, a little more of that gravitas thing. He had a military record and he had specialized in foreign affairs in the Senate. I thought that would help Kerry in the General Election this time around with War and Terror on people's minds. On edit I will add that I also respected Kerry's early leadership in the anti Viet Nam war movement and hoped Kerry would draw from that well of moral convictions if he became President.

With the "wisdom" of hindsight I now would clearly rank Dean as my second choice from last year's field, I was immediately uncomfortable with the way Kerry ran his nominating Convention and it wasn't until late September that I thought he hit his stride. That was too late. Dean would have been aggressive earlier in my opinion. Clark however was and still is my clear first choice.