Presidential election, in hindsight

CAMBRIDGE -- Perhaps, the manager of his failed presidential bid admitted, Senator John F. Kerry should have responded more quickly to ads attacking his Vietnam War record by personally rebutting the charges as a group of Vietnam veterans emerged to oppose him earlier this year.

"In hindsight, maybe we should have put him out earlier," former campaign manager Mary Beth Cahill conceded in a rare public appearance at Harvard last night.

And maybe, in hindsight, President Bush should have fought back harder at accusations that he was planning to reinstate the draft, according to his former campaign manager, Ken Mehlman. "That was a mistake," Mehlman acknowledged to the same crowd. "We should have more forcefully responded."

Six weeks after Kerry conceded defeat on Nov. 3, the managers of both the Kerry and Bush campaigns included those fairly tame admissions as they convened to pick apart the election results last night, the start of a traditional postelection post-mortem for political operatives, reporters, and students at Harvard's Institute of Politics at the John F. Kennedy School of Government.

Billed as a scholarly venture held after every race since 1972, the Harvard seminar is as much a chance for the two sides to write quick revisions into the political history books -- and for strategists who felt unfairly blamed for mistakes, especially on the losing side, to air their version of events. Any livelier moments are likely to take place behind closed doors during an all-day session today, as lower-level strategists jump into the mix for appearances that will not be made public until Harvard publishes its transcripts of the quadrennial session afterward.

In public, the two sides offered not terribly new judgments of their own performances. But with emotions still raw -- and vote recounts continuing in Ohio -- the campaign managers exchanged a few light barbs over the race. Cahill, following a comment by Mehlman about the president's nuanced position on stem cell research, shot back that she was happy "to hear nuance from the Bush campaign," drawing laughter from a crowd presumably well aware of the criticism Kerry drew from Republicans for holding opinions that were too nuanced and complex.

Mehlman prompted some laughter, as well -- though some of it apparently unintentional. Asked how the Bush campaign handled creative tension between campaign strategists and the candidate, Mehlman said that Bush welcomed dissent during the race -- an argument the audience did not appear to buy amid a Cabinet reshuffling that has seen the president elevate close loyalists.

At another point, Cahill dwelled on the "Swift Boat ads" -- anti-Kerry advertisements about his war service initiated by a group of former Vietnam veterans. Cahill appeared still vexed by the ordeal, calling the initially small advertising buy "the best $40,000 investment ever made by any political group." Whether the campaign reacted quickly enough has been the source of some of the greatest post-game disputes, with some Kerry advisers insisting they had argued for a tougher response.