If If's And But's Were Candy And Nuts. . . .

For six months in '03, everything I read said I was dead. I felt I could win and would win, and I won the nomination. And I came within a hair of beating a wartime president with a pretty decent economy and a 50 percent approval rating. I think that's a campaign to be proud of, not defensive about. . . . Look, we won the nomination, and we came damn close to winning, and people better go back and check the history books as to how hard it is to beat a sitting president in a time of war. The mood has changed like night and day from when I was running in '04 to where we are now. If it had been two months later, three months later, you'd have had a very different mood.