Historical Implications

I love to think about the stories that will be written in the future about this presidential campaign. As we saw last time, history is not nuanced about these things -- Gore, with hindsight, became a condescending, exaggerating, hapless loser who couldn't campaign his way out of a paper bag. Needless to say, if Kerry loses tomorrow, he'll join the line of weak Democratic candidates for President, remembered in the same sentence as Mondale and Dukakis. But it's even more striking for Bush. If he gets voted out of office, I could easily see him being viewed as the worst President since Hoover or Coolidge. More personally for him, the whole Bush name becomes synonymous with "one-term." National politics are as high stakes and zero-sum as it gets.

Also, the contrast between the candidates' campaign strategy (Bush = base; Kerry = swing votes) has been established to cliche. As these things go, the actual strategy is probably more complex than the media suggests. But, success tends to breed mimicry, and whichever party wins will set the tone for future national campaigns. And, if it's Bush, does anyone think that the Democrats are going to nominate the "electable" guy in the future?