David Wade answers to the charge that Romney is the same as Kerry [View all]

[Mass]

http://bostonherald.com/news/opinion/op_ed/view/20220314hobbled_on_kerrys_path

Hobbled on Kerry’s path

By David Wade
Wednesday, March 14, 2012 - Updated 12 hours ago
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In politics, we love parallels. Historic comparisons chew up dead-air time, particularly on a long night of exit poll gazing as results trickle in on an anything-but-Super Tuesday.

But analogies have their limits, and one 2012 meme sorely in need of fact-checking is the awkward parallel often drawn between John Kerry’s march and Mitt Romney’s long and bumpy slog toward their parties’ nominations.
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I can acknowledge similarities. Kerry and Romney share great heads of hair, boast central-casting presidential bearing, hail from Massachusetts (though Romney has invoked New Hampshire and Michigan as home when politically convenient) and neither is worried where his next sandwich is coming from.
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John Kerry didn’t limp to the Democratic nomination. Nor did he struggle consolidating his base the way Romney has.
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But in comparing Kerry and Romney, any history other than the revisionist kind prove those seeds were not planted in Kerry’s victorious Iowa snow or his string of successive spring triumphs against Democratic rivals. Accurately diagnosing Romney’s strengths or weaknesses as a prospective Republican nominee requires a more sophisticated metric.

Interestingly, others agree

http://www.politico.com/blogs/burns-haberman/2012/03/kerryworld-disputes-mitt-analogy-contd-117433.html

A Romney-Obama may end up looking a lot like the Kerry-Bush campaign, in that it would likely be a close race fought over the fundamentals of the state of the nation, with one candidate buoyed by incumbency and the other hobbled by personal political shortcomings. But for the purposes of the primary, Wade's right and he's making a version of a point Republicans have made privately over the last few months: even the seriously flawed Kerry earned the respect and support of his party, and persuaded much of the country that he could be a strong challenger for Bush, in a way that Romney has not matched.

(I obviously disagree with "seriously flawed", but it is interesting to see that even people who do not like Kerry see the difference.