Fred Barnes, and
Dick Morris argue that Tuesday night was the highwater mark of the Kerry campaign. Kerry has become the Democratic nominee by default, he faced no serious attacks from a remarkably weak group of opponents in the primary. Noonan admits that Kerry is not insane which is what, she suggests, he had over Howard Dean and Wes Clark. Fred Barnes argues that Kerry would have been better off if he had faced and defeated a serious challenge in the primary process and become better known to the American people.
Now the battle begins, and close scrutiny of this Senator from Massachusetts who has the most liberal voting record among all U.S. Senators, according to ’National Journal’, and the Bush campaign will help define Kerry to the American people.
It will be a close race but I think Bush will win. There will be big debates about the War on Terror, about the economy, about same sex marriage, etc. but let’s face it, the biggest problem facing most Americans today is: obesity. Sounds like a good year for incumbents to me.
As Dick Morris wrote: "THE Democratic Party slit its throat last night, abandoning 12 years of pragmatism to indulge in a nominee who’s very unlikely to win.
While John Edwards closed the gap that separated him from John Kerry, the front-loading of the nominating process proved too drastic to permit second thoughts. Once the Democratic voters had discarded Howard Dean and embraced Kerry, they did not have the dexterity to rethink Kerry in the light of the Edwards alternative.
Too bad for the Democrats: Edwards would have been a much stronger candidate in November than Kerry will be. He is not the extreme liberal that the front-runner is and has not had 20 years in the Senate to demonstrate how out of touch he is with American values and ideas."
I look at the post-realignment cycle in politics -- FDR’s "coalition" and the Reagan "Revolution" (what Noonan called the "quiet realignment") -- and I calculate that the Democrats are right where the Republicans were in 1964. We heard a lot of chatter about the "choice, not an echo" during Dean’s rise to the top, which of course echoes the Goldwater, anti-Rockefeller wing) run against the establishment in 1964. That it was Kerry and not the "insane" Dean doesn’t change the equation all that much. In our hearts we still know that Kerry’s nuts, too.
So I don’t think this race will be all that close. In fact, look for Bush to win pretty big but without Johnson’s "consensus" he had in 1965. Thus Hillary, Bill’s VP, like Ike’s VP, Nixon, will serve as the great Democratic Party comeback story for 2008. If, that is, they don’t Whig-out first. :)