Yes, I think we democrats were in for a lose-lose situation, unless we were to be able to regain at least the senate. Otherwise there is no way this term could have gone well for John Kerry in terms of political power. And in my opinion, the Democrats having long-term politcal power is good for this country. Of course Republicans will disagree because that is the nature of politics.
But who will run as Bush’s sucessor? Cheny can’t win, I don’t think. He says he isn’t interested in running for president, but that doesnt’ really matter what he says, right? But Bush had a lot of strengths that a sucessor from outside of the administration can’t have. Firstly, since 911 he is the one that has security as his strong suit. He is the only one that has shown the ability of preventing terror attacks (as flimsy as evidence that he actually did anything may be). Of course we won’t t know the Republican nominee for some time, but I imagine that Karl Rove will want to have it be someone in the administration, to build on this reputation. But that means he’ll have to name someone to some cabinent post, I guess to be able to do this.
Otherwise the new republican will be running from a faction that isn’t the ruling one. They will most certainly be against the war if it didn’t work.
But I think that Iraq is just going to turn into a big version of Gazaa in a slow process. If Bush manages to somehow win this, then there will be no problems, but if it continues on the way down, it will be better for the democrats. And by better, I mean that we’ll be able to pull out. By then there will probably be little other choice as we will have obliterated all of our possible good-will that would let the people over there accept our presence as a good thing.
What would have happened to Kerry? Well… not many good things. He’d be facing a deeeeeply divided country with an ornery republican majorty that is mad about losing the presidency by such a small margin AND winning the popular vote. It would be political warfare for the next 2 years and possibly a republican attempt at impeachment if once they gained more in 2006. He’d be a lame duck from start to finish.
Although we democrats were ready to make changes, the nation wasn’t. This whole bush presidency hasn’t played itself out to its logical end to some people, so they want to see what he can do now.
The good thing now is that this is all his now. No Clinton recession, no 9/11, no nothing. That’s all going to sound like hollow excuses now. Its a big responsiblity to have what he has now. Plus the idea that all of these investigations are going to tarnish a lot of important people to him. Valery Plame may come up. They’ve pissed off a lot of people there in DC, and they probably wanted to defeat him in the polls. I wonder if anything will come of that.