You should have known that it wouldn’t take long. On Tuesday, we had the midterm elections. On Wednesday, basically, the general election of 2004 began.
At the federal level, the aftermath of all the Democratic bloodletting was that the various aspirants for the party’s presidential nomination rearranged themselves in line (and, according to exuberant Republicans still flush with their 2002 victories, that line leads onto a sinking ship). House Minority Leader Richard Gephardt, perhaps the most sensible of the Democratic possibilities to date, stepped gracefully aside in the House and probably took himself out of the running. Tom Daschle, having less class, didn’t yet do the same in the Senate, but his political problems are similar.
Al Gore says that he was prescient, that if the Democrats had listened to him and drawn more distinctions with President George W. Bush the party would have prevailed on Tuesday. Don’t buy it. First of all, Gore is hoping his revisionism won’t be closely examined. Far from clearly defining an alternative strategy on either World War IV or the soft economy, he made a few speeches that were critical of Bush but vague on details. He did exactly the same thing in his (few) pre-election commentaries that he is now criticizing his colleagues for doing. He went negative, not positive, on key issues.
Second, I don’t think that an anti-war, anti-tax cut message would have sold this year. The Republican candidates didn’t just win because they energized their base – though that did happen. They also won over the swing voters who showed up, who seemed willing to trust Bush on the war and who are often turned off by left-wing economics of the sort that critics now say the Dems should have embraced.
The commentariat has decided that Sens. John Kerry of Massachusetts and John Edwards of North Carolina gained the most from the 2002 losses, at least in relative terms. But Kerry campaigned strongly for statewide Democrats in New England, who lost, and Edwards obviously spent a lot of time with Erskine Bowles, for all the good it did him. Neither has demonstrated an ability to rise above the field, and in Edwards’ case he can’t made a credible claim to a solid base in his home state.
Perhaps the Dems will come up with some new faces, from the ranks of their (swelling) gubernatorial ranks. I don’t buy the Howard Dean boomlet (he’s the outgoing governor of Vermont and mixes some good fiscal conservative credentials with the usual liberal positions on social issues). He’s from too small a state and can’t go national quickly enough. The constant comparisons to Jimmy Carter prove primarily that the national media can’t tell why Georgia is more important than Vermont in the presidential sweepstakes.
I think that the presidential field is pretty much wide open for Democrats. In the GOP, I will go out on a limb and predict that Bush will be renominated.
On the state side, North Carolina Republicans are already hoping to build on their 2002 momentum by coming up with a credible challenger to Gov. Mike Easley, or his Democratic replacement should the eventuality present itself. Later this week, I’ll run down the list of potential nominees, or at least the ones visible at this juncture.