Excellent point. I've been saying a long time the the man is an idiot. The 2004 election should have been a slaughter, not the squeaker that it was. There was so much material to use against the buffoon Kerry, he should have only carried Massachusetts.
But Rove and Bush chose to go easy on him, just like they've been doing with the Dem's for 6 years now.
And now, we're gonna pay for it.
They went easy on him because Kerry launched his attack first on Bush's National Guard service. If you look at past elections Kerry has been involved in, he won using his phony record as a war hero against his opponent who usually did not have military service. That was the strategy against Bush, including his "reporting for duty" speech at the Dem National convention, traveling to the convention by boat with his swift boat crew, and trotting out former flag officers like potted plants. It almost worked.
Rove was terrified to go after Kerry's phony war record and his anti-war efforts for fear that the comparison between Bush's lack of wartime military service with Kerry's war record would be a negative. Thankfully, the SBVFT took Kerry on and froze him like a deer in the headlights for almost a month during the campaign. He had no answer to the charges except to trot out surrogates to defend him. That was the difference between victory and defeat. I fault Rove for not going after Kerry's anti-war record, including his meeting twice with the North Vietnamese and VC in Paris while still a member of the USNR subject to recall and his participation in VVAW meetings, at which there were discussions to assassinate USG officials.