John Kerry on controlling his own message
MR. RUSSERT: What was the biggest mistake you made, the most important lesson you learned from the presidential race?
SEN. KERRY: Tim, I can go down that road and we can spend a lot of time talking about it. I, I—let me just say this: I made some mistakes. I know what they are and I take responsibility for them. My campaign, I take responsibility. I think the most important thing would have been to spend more money, if we could have, on the, you know, advertising and responding to some of the attacks. But we...
MR. RUSSERT: The swift boat ads?
SEN. KERRY: Yeah, but we—people forget, we had a 13-week general election; they had an eight-week general election. We had the same pot of money. We had to harbor our resources in a different way, and we didn’t have the same freedom. I think the biggest mistake was probably not going outside the federal financing so we could have controlled our own message.