Disagree. You always aim for the victory now because the future is so uncertain.

Example 1: In 1992 many conservatives made the argument that with the S&L crisis, the economic problems, and the problems with the end of the cold war, that whoever won would have a bad 4 years, so it was better for the Democrat to win.

Of course, that didn't work out they way they wanted, in terms of the Presidency. The GOP did take Congress in 1994, but that wasn't foreseen in 1992.

Example 2: In the mid 1990s Thatcherites actively hoped for a Labour victory as they saw it as the only way to get rid of Major. They predicted that Labour would screw up and that the Tories would regain power quickly. Well, the Tories are poised to regain power now, but it didn't happen quickly, to be sure.

Thank you, Hilzoy. This argument has always been repugnant, though how much it takes ignoring real harm to real people to make it usually masked in the presentation.

Anonny: I think we agree, then. I always want to aim for victory now. I never want to have to explain to the victims of Katrina why I didn't work as hard as I could to make sure that what happened to them didn't happen.

Liberals, and everyone else, were better off with a Bush victory, and will be with a McCain victory too. Liberals just won't recognize the fact.

If you're willing to argue that we ought to be glad Kerry lost, then I think you ought to be willing to explain to the loved ones of someone who died as a result of our incompetent response why it was for the best that their loved one died.

I have a similar reaction when some people argue that if Lincoln had managed things differently, the Civil War wouldn't have happened and after a few decades the South would have given up slavery gradually, without violence--a better outcome. Even if we believe this, and even knowing that 620K people died in the Civil War, that leaves four million people in slavery for a few decades--hardly a slam dunk.

This is a bit off-topic, I guess, but it's just another example of a counterfactual that's really not worth thinking much about.

I get your point, but I was one of those people who felt like Kerry needed to lose for the following reasons:

1) He and the other Senate Dem's had capitulated their war-making authority to the President in a way that made Iraq very easy for Bush. Then the party insiders eviscerated the one candidate (Dean) who said loudly that the war was a debacle. This whole scenario simply reinforced the perception that Democrats stand for nothing except calculating the best way to win elections.

2) The right wing noise machine had somehow become "respectable". The MSM started listening to Rush and Hannity and O'Reilly and thinking "hmmm maybe they've got a point". Bush, their Main Man, has shown these people to clearly be hacks. Bush has discredited them in the minds of anyone with an even marginally open mind.

Kerry would have breathed life in the whack jobs, and would have rewarded a mindset by the Dem's that I think is bad for the country. The next Dem contender won't go to Bob Shrum or Mark Penn and ask "How should I vote on this war resolution..."

It's an argument that only looks good if you can't actually see the future but see a certain projection of the future. When I read Kevin's assessment, my immediate first thought was, "well, yeah, try telling that to the kid whose parents were shot right before her eyes at a checkpoint in Iraq." Any iteration of human suffering suffices to make the argument pretty unpleasant. As a straight up analysis of electoral prospects, it's probably accurate, but as a moral quandry, no sale.

Those are not arguments I'm prepared to make.

I am.

Katrina had nothing to do with Bush being in office, but the disastrous aftermath of Katrina that to this day still scars entire neighborhoods in New Orleans has everything to do with those who, after seeing the imbecilic incompetence of Das Bush in his first term, were more than willing to put him back in for another four years.

Gitmo had nothing to do with Bush, but it had everything to do with the god-blaspheming little cowardly trolls who call themselves the Religious Right, and declared that everyone not Christian enough in their self-righteous vision deserved to be treated like cattle in a slaughterhouse.

Iraq had nothing to do with Bush, but it had everything to do with the forever-war mentality that is the modern GOP, with its heinous criminality of using bombs and bullets to masquerade the bread-and-butter issues of jobs, healthcare, viable mortgage security for homeowners, and safety nets for pensions.

Bush was, is, and will always be a moronic clusterfuck of an administrator. The fact that he wrecked everything beyond imagination is nothing more than the natural outcome of putting a moronic clusterfuck into any administrative position of power.

Yes---it may be beyond the pale to say that the country is better off for the moronic clusterfuck to have been given a second term, but if those that have suffered underGWB43's encore misperformance prevent these filth from coming to power for the next thirty years or so by using a moronic clusterfuck sock-puppet as their poster-boy, then who can say how many "Iraq Wars" and "Gitmos" and "Katrina Aftermaths" may be prevented?

The people who put Bush in for a second term are responsible, and with just a wee bit of luck, they'll all die of old age before they get another chance to screw this country over again....

When wilt thou save the people,
O God of mercy, when?
The people, Lord, the people,
not stones and crowns, but men?
-Godspell

Thanks, Hilzoy.

Drum: But for myself, I think I'm convinced. The cause of liberal change is better served by Obama in 2008 than it would have been by Kerry in 2004.

And, thank god, Gore lost too. WTF?

This is exactly the kind of ideological intellectual masturbation that makes we want to puke. 2004 wasn't about playing political fucking chess, it was about trying to keep as many people alive as possible by changing the course of the Iraq War. That includes our troops, the Iraqi people, and everyone who might be at risk because of an emboldened Iran -- like, say, the entire population of Israel.

The fact that Kerry did not win is not good for anyone. It's made us weaker economically, diplomatically and militarily. It left New Orleans to drown. It left the greed-driven financial system ticking like a doomsday bomb. It left oil companies to soak up record profits at the expense of you and me.

And this is somehow a good thing? How completely fucking detached from reality do you have to be to say something like that? Oh, wait -- I know: you have to be the kind of egghead douchebag who's never gone hungry and never turned a shovel full of dirt in your life. Assholes.

Could Kerry have done much as President? Who know? But he couldn't have done as badly as Bush, could he? And we wouldn't be up to our ass in disasters like we are now, would we? And the entire freaking world wouldn't think we're a laughing stock or an insane asylum or both, would they?

We're where we are now because the sliver of swing voters who bought into Bush's terrorism hype in 2004 finally realized it got badly burned. That's what's changed. But those people are no more interested in a progressive/lefty political agenda -- or a bunch of asshole loudmouth progressive bloggers -- than they were in Bush's right-wing idiocy.

They want somebody to run the damn country. That's all they want. Somebody to do the goddam job. Anyone who thinks this moment is a sudden movement in the direction of liberalism in this country has their head as far up their ass as does Karl Rove or the entire staff of FOX News.

The fact that we stand on the doorstep of a truly transformative moment in our history is due solely to the magnitude of Bush's incompetence. When history asks just how bad Bush was, the next photograph in the line of presidental succession will answer the question.

Yes: we're lucky to have Barack Obama at this moment. But anyone who thinks this moment is worth what happened to this country over the past four years is an elitist idiot who doesn't know anything about suffering or real pain.

You could apply the same arguments today.

The surge, combined with payoffs to the Sunnis, have lowered the violence levels in Iraq. But, like so many other Republican solutions, it's not clear that anything but a band-aid has been acheived. When we leave, the Sunnis may be in for a world of hurt, and violence is almost sure to escalate (and remains at horrific levels even now.)

At some point, a terrorist plot will succeed. It probably won't be the nuclear scenario, but our lack of focus on Al Queda outside of Iraq means that they've had time and resources (and easy recruiting) to be plotting something.

The financial meltdown is going to be hard to deal with. Budgets will be more difficult to balance, on the federal, state, local, and family levels. The housing market was pumped by Bush for years and was the thing leading to apparent GDP growth, that's gone for a long time. Any solutions will piss someone, a lot of someones, off, because we can't afford anything else.

Warmer ocean temperatures mean there will be more strong hurricanes, and our financial circumstances will make those harder to deal with.

There's a lot of chickens that will come home to roost in the next two and four years. Would we be better off having a Republican deal with them? By giving tax cuts to the rich, wire tapping, keeping the war in Iraq going for the next 100 years, leaving Gitmo open for business? By leaving the middle class scraping for the trickled down droppings of the wealthy elite? Privatizing (by some other name) social security? Transferring risk to the government, and rewards to the friends of those in power?

Personally, I think no. Sure, it will be politically hard, and Dems will need even more support two and four years from now than they do today - because people will far to quickly forget the problems and excesses of Republican government, unless we remind them.

But we have a country that we love that needs better leadership. We have people that will suffer if McCain is left in charge, but in America and elsewhere. We have a land that we should be proud of that has been shamed by torture and unjust war.

The time to take it back would have been four years ago, eight years ago. If we don't take it back tomorrow, we'll regret it for the next four years, and maybe the next fifty years.

Let's take it back.

The only way to destroy the conservatives was to give them enough rope to hang themselves with.

If you're willing to argue that we ought to be glad Kerry lost, then I think you ought to be willing to explain to the loved ones of someone who died as a result of our incompetent response why it was for the best that their loved one died.

"The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants."

I think there are two different reasons to have "wanted" Kerry's loss:

1) The country needed to go through hell to see the devil. I'm sorry for the lost lives associated with the Bush Presidency, but the Republicans had/have become a danger to democracy itself. We could have fought in the trenches up to this points with a split government and the country would never have realized what a noxious cesspool Republican thinking had become.

OR

2) Kerry didn't deserve to win because at a crucial moment he decided (along with Hillary and John Edwards) to take the route paved by polls. I voted, canvassed, gave money to Kerry but in my heart of hearts I wanted him to lose for this one reason.

Calling the next four years is like calling the stock market. Everybody does it so someone will be right. But not many. Even fewer of those in the next rotation. Is it judgement or luck?

As a non-citizen I couldn't believe you guys voted the hapless half-wit back in for another 4 years. But you did and I couldn't grasp the reality the majority of you were looking at.

So, if all goes well, the U.S. will end up with an intelligent, thoughtful president who guides the country through the present crises successfully to a brighter dawn. The whole world would benefit. But there's many a slip between cup and lip.

Let's all hope for the best. We could all use it.

It's not whether you win or lose, it's how you play the game. Roberts. Alito. On the Supreme Court for the next thirty, forty, maybe fifty years. No biggee.

Hey, I get it! Let's keep voting Republican. As disaster after disaster piles up, as America declines and becomes a third world country on its way out, rather than on its way up, the people might finally learn their lesson and vote Democratic. Only there won't be any Phoenix to rise from the ashes in, say, 2208. It's pretty hard to predict when Jesus II is coming, and maybe he won't be a liberal, anyway. He might be a warmongering right winger, as Jesus I is believed to be by red-staters.

But more to the point, what kind of nonsense is this to speculate on that which never happened, as if it had, and to try to project what might have been, but never will, based on that premise?

Really, on a slow news day, when the world is at peace, when nothing significant is coming down the pike, and a few from the office at quitting time might wander down to the old TGIF watering hole, this might be an interesting topic.

But otherwise? Please. And I'm not criticizing Hilzoy for the post, but those who made it fodder. Isn't there enough real excitement on this election eve?

"So I should only consider hoping Kerry loses if I am convinced that Bush will be a complete disaster."
here's where we part company.
some of us were convinced of that .... I myself remember being vaguely glad when Kerry lost, even though everyone here in NYC was talking about seceding the East Coast to Canada at the time. I knew there was a world of hurt coming our way, and I wanted it to manifest itself under Bush.
Watch the viciousness of the attacks that shall shortly commence against Obama. You are underestimating the enemy.

forgot to add this:"If you're willing to argue that we ought to be glad Kerry lost, then I think you ought to be willing to explain to the loved ones of someone who died.... why it was for the best that their loved one died."
Because we are in a war, dammit. People die in wars; that's what wars do, is kill people. And after watching this country agree to the invasion of Iraq, I knew people would have to die before they understood the Bush administration was criminal (although honestly I'd only thought they'd have to die in Iraq).
Now it seems they have to die here at home for those with no imagination.

Hilzoy conflates two different arguments here. It is one thing to ask if we as a nation would have been better off if John Kerry had won in 2004; it is another to ask if liberalism would have been better off. Hilzoy acts as though Drum were asking the former, when it is obvious from the quote that he is arguing the latter. One can believe Kerry would have done a better job while noting that his loss would be good for American liberalism in the long run.

It's deeply reassuring to me that Kevin Drum is getting his ass handed to him in the comments section of his blog.

On 9/11/05, Juan Cole penned an article that touched me, entitled 9/11, 7/7 and 8/30.
7/7 was the London bombings that resulted from Zawahiri left out there to plot against the West, 8/30 the Katrina disaster.

Juan noted that with Katrina,"... the blow was psychological and political.The abysmal job that Bush and Co. did in responding to the disaster, which cost so many lives, will not soon be forgotten. What, many security experts are asking, if this had been a terrorist strike? Unpreparedness of this epochal sort could sink the government."

"Bush has given us the worst of all possible worlds--a half-finished job against al-Qaeda, an Iraqi imbroglio that could still explode into civil or even regional war--and which serves as an al-Qaeda recruiting tool--, a government starved for funds, an enormous windfall for the rich at the expense of the middle class (which saw average wages actually fall recently), and an inability to respond effectively to a major urban catastrophe.
"Four years after September 11, al-Qaeda's leadership should have been behind bars or dead. Four years after September 11, Afghanistan should have been stabilized. Four years after September 11, the government should have been ready to save lives in an urban disaster."
"Bush recently started likening his poorly conceived and misnamed "war on terror" to World War II."
"What his handlers have forgotten is how long World War II lasted for the United States.
Four years.
In four years, Roosevelt and his allies defeated Nazi Germany and imperial Japan. In four years, Bush hasn't managed even to corner bin Ladin and a few hundred scruffy terrorists; or to extract himself from the deserts of Iraq, or to put the government's finances in good order so it can deal with crises like Katrina."
Four years. I think about the victims of 9/11, and now 7/7. We have let you down."
posted by Juan

Now it is eight years...
None of us were better off with a Bush Victory in 2004.
I had an absolute visceral reaction to thinking otherwise.
cwa

Drum is making another one of his stupid mother fucking wonky assumptions here: that, because of all the bad shit that has happened -- deaths and other catastrophes -- a lesson has been learned, namely, that "liberalism" is now seen as better than "conservatism."

Bull fucking shit. That lesson has NOT been learned. Fuck, when Maddow asked Obama the other evening why he didn't blame Republicans or Conservatism, rather than Bush, for the nation's problems, he answered with the stupid fucking argument that he might need some of those Republicans. In other words, our fucking standard bearer didn't even buy into Drum's stupid assumption that a lesson has been learned.

Listen up, dems: NO FUCKING LESSON HAS BEEN LEARNED. Republicanism or conservatism is NOT being rejected if Obama wins. And if he can't turn the economy around in two years, then we will have gained NOTHING for the last four years of misery!

The trade-off isn't four lost years in exchange for the triumph of liberalism.

Paradoxically, Hilzoy, I find myself both agreeing and disagreeing with you. On the one hand, yes, working to defeat Bush in 2004 was important. Yes, the disaster he was likely to bring was a big argument for supporting Kerry, not him. I agree with all of that.

But then there's the other hand. Would an uninspiring candidate ("Anybody but Bush!" is not a compelling slogan) from the mealy-mouthed "GOP-lite" party really have been an effective president? Would he have been able to do any good? This is not about the game-theory of politics you (quite rightfully) sneer at, these are deadly serious questions. And they were questions I was asking myself even back in 2004. How was Kerry going to build a consensus to, for example, end the illegal occupation of Iraq if the American people didn't really believe in him?

So yes, I agree that Bush should have lost, if only because he was already a colossal failure and didn't deserve a second term. But the democrats were still weak and ineffectual, and that probably would have damaged their ability to lead the nation. That has changed *not* because of the GOP's implosion over the past 3 or 4 years, but because the Democrats finally have a real platform and a candidate willing to fight for it. At least one of those two things were missing in 2004, and without that, how good and effective would a Kerry administration really have been?

This is all so familiar. I remember a sort-of friend of mine (OK, we were civil with each other, anyhow) contending very strongly in 1968 that if we could just elect Nixon - or, better yet, Wallace - and give American a real dose of what conservative government was like we could get rid of that nonsense and liberalism (well, in his case left-wing radicalism) would make everything perfect after the following election. We all remember how well that worked out, don't we. (And if Nixon hadn't been a paranoid, it would have probably have been even worse.)

"and if you think we are playing a game, then you're in the relatively fortunate position of being personally indifferent to the outcome of the election because of the security of your station and finances, and maybe you should think about those who don't have that luxury."

Damn, I think that Dana just pretty much nailed everything that is wrong with our modern "news" organizations and talking heads right there. It's pretty hard to understand economic insecurity when you're trying to decide which Georgetown cocktail party to go to this weekend.

You're being a little unfair. Of course caring more about the benefit to a political party's chances than about the impact on the lives of normal people is repugnant. If you find arguments purely analyzing the chances of political parties without noting the effect on normal people that disgusting - then don't publicize them.

But they were only talking about the Democratic party's prospects, and there's simply no doubt that 2006 and 2008 played much much better for the Dems than they would have if Kerry had won in 2004. This is in fact always true: America is a strongly anti-incumbent country, and the price of winning (especially the Presidency) is a slow but constant erosion in the favorability of that party. Midterm elections almost always benefit the party opposing the president. This is a relevant political fact, and there's no reason to dismiss it.

The duopoly, contra George Wallace and others, isn't quite Tweedledee and Tweedledum; there's more than a dime's worth of difference, not even counting inflation.

That said, the Kool-Aid drinkers expecting real change? I'll be checking on you frequently, especially around midterm elections and the next general.

I'll see just how much of the neolib Kool-Aid you'll have swallowed by then, because that's what you'll be drinking.

I regretted when Bush stole the election in 2000; I regretted when Kerry lost in 2004. Honor, honesty, accountability, "fair play" -- no watchwords for Bush & Co. here!

Look back to the impeachment hearings of '98: With those, the Red Tide devalued our political institutions to such a degree that any immediately subsequent effort at impeachment would seem likewise cheap and tawdry. Innocent people have been tortured by Bush folks; citizens have been deprived of their rights to vote; bankers are taking gov't money and using it to pay dividends to keep their shareholders happy.

All the same, Jeesh, Econobuzz, for all your bitching, what do you value? Let's try good government for once. We lost so much when we abandoned those smoke-filled conference rooms. Obama is opening the discussion for give and take -- tell me where that was part of the political discourse over the past eight years? And tell me why we couldn't value the process now.

I'm not saying I wouldn't be glad to see Bush, Cheney, etc., admiring the view from the prisonyard of ClubFed Danbury. But between a cheerfully ignorant population and a recalcitrant press corps, how could we possibly imagine that the political corps would be able to leap into the breech?

Truman was right: We got the gov't we deserved, for eight long years. Econobuzz, I'm not going to pin all this on your '00 vote for Nader in New Hampshire. But there comes a time when the firing squads get too busy, and there is more blood than debate.

Let Waxman work his particular magic, but please, let's keep the focus of gov't business on the people's needs.

It's a good thing that Obama is going to lose tomorrow. We can wait another four years for someone even better to come along. We can sit and watch President McCain get saddled with the economic crisis and extricating the troops from Iraq (or keep them there for 100 years?)

So what if he appoints right-wing nutcases to the Supreme Court, ensuring a conservative majority for the next couple of generations? The NEXT Democratic nominee might win in 2012… unless conditions aren't quite right, so we should wait until 2016… or 2020…

This argument ignores the fact that in 2004 Democrats had yet to assemble an electoral coalition that could win reliably win elections post-1968. Carter and Clinton were both elected without getting a majority of votes, and both struggled to work with their pre-1968 parties to get things done.

Democrats had to get rid of the deadweight of the 1960s--the hack consultants, the short-sighted special interest groups, the anti-progressive trade unionists--and losing to Bush helped the party realize that they needed to rebuild their party from scratch.

Once they did so, they found that they could build off successes in places like the Mountain West and the Mid-Atlantic to assemble a new coalition that didn't depend on the shrinking and unreliable white working-class. If Obama carries VA, NC, CO, NV tomorrow, it will be easy for him to keep those states in the Democratic fold through investments in the urban population centers in those states. Turning those large, and growing, states blue will give Democrats a generation-long advantage in the electoral college comparable to Nixon's Southern strategy.

This seems worth what would have been a disastrous, potentially one-term presidency for Kerry. He wouldn't have had the same mandate for change that Obama will have tomorrow, and Democrats would not have had the object-lesson of the Bush presidency to discredit conservatives for a generation.

This is why I don't come to this site much anymore since Drum left. Hilzoy is an absolute waste.

Hey, Hilzoy. You couldn't predict that 4 more years of Bush would only compound the disaster he'd sown in his first term? Were you afraid that Bush's plan to build peace loving democracies in the Middle East would actually work? Did you not comprehend that Bush's willingness to ignore all economic issues except for tax cuts for the rich and suboptimal trade policies would help destabilize the economy and make a financial crisis that much more disasterous (there were plenty of people even then who saw the warning signs, including writers for the WM.)

By the way, when exactly did Democrats get spines? I missed that. Was it sometime in between Democratic capitulation over FISA, telecom immunity, the Mukasey appt, Iraq war funding, pursuing limp investigations into Bush-Cheney malfeasance, getting bitch slapped by Bush people who invoke exec priviledge, voting for offshore drilling, declaring Iran's Revolutionary Guard a terrorist organization, taking impeachment off the table, etc, etc? Where exactly was the backbone? Maybe it was trusting the administration with $700B to rescue us from a melt down on Wall St. I dunno. Anyone know what party cheerleader Hilzoy's talking about?

Only somebody who has a personally comfortable position, and doesn't REALLY mind that other people are suffering domestically and internationally ... would make such an argument. Think about it carefully. They have precious little or no skin in the game.

"You couldn't predict that 4 more years of Bush would only compound the disaster he'd sown in his first term? Were you afraid that Bush's plan to build peace loving democracies in the Middle East would actually work? Did you not comprehend that Bush's willingness to ignore all economic issues except for tax cuts for the rich and suboptimal trade policies would help destabilize the economy and make a financial crisis that much more disasterous (there were plenty of people even then who saw the warning signs, including writers for the WM.)"

No, I knew it would be a disaster. That's why I worked as hard as I knew how to prevent it. I failed. A lot of people paid for that. Some of them are dead.

I just don't want to say that it was all OK, because hey, we're winning now. It is not OK. For some people, it will never be OK again.

Amen to:

The people who put Bush in for a second term are responsible, and with just a wee bit of luck, they'll all die of old age before they get another chance to screw this country over again....

Kevin Drum's argument makes as much sense as Hilzoy's argument. Why? Because they actually have a brain to come up with arguments - whether you agree with them or not.

On the other hand, you have the knuckle draggers, and room temperature IQ people who vote viscerally / emotionally for the Republican ticket, without even pondering what the consequences are. In their mind, if Limbaugh, Hannity, O'Reilly, Coulter, and their ilk say so, it must be true.

You can't argue with those people. As witnessed in this election cycle, they still haven't seen how screwed up their so-called conservative movement is. If they would use an ounce of common sense, Obama would be ahead in the polls by a 70% to 24% (current number of people who still think Bush is doing a great job) With the remainding 6% being clueless 'undecided' voters.

It doesn't matter HOW bad the Republican screw up this country, there are enough STUPID people who will keep on voting for them.

It's pretty hard to predict when Jesus II is coming . . .

Not at all: Never.

Garnash (if that is your real name):

You're the waste. Hilzoy's still got one oar in reality, which is one more than you. If you want to worship Drum, go worship him. If you need live for intellectual rigor that has no connection to reality, apparently he's your man.

Replacing right-wing, chest-thumping, intellectual blowhards with their counterparts on the left is not what I signed up for in this election or in 2004. The goal was to find people who could GOVERN, not try to make some bullshit, pointy-headed ideological template fit the moment.

I've had my fill of listening to the anti-Democratic progressives talk trash. They don't ever want to step up and do the dirty work, or be responsible for the complexities of governing a diverse culture and nation. You want a 'pure' country? Mix up a big batch of purple kool-aid and drink your fill with Jim Jones.

Me, I'm going to try to get things done in the real world.

I remember hearing similar arguments from Nader supporters in 2000. It was a bit different, they'd say it's got to get worse before it will get better.

I didn't buy it then and I don't buy it now. I worked my butt off to get Kerry elected and I don't regret doing that. I'm pleased now that we have such a fine candidate in Obama but that doesn't mean I wish Kerry hadn't won!

Tell Drum to tell that to the families of the soldiers and Iraqis killed since 2004, not to mention all the people who are about to become unemployed as a result of the meltdown in our banking system that might have been ameliorated a bit with a Democratic administration.

There is never a good time for a neo-con Presidency

I feel like I just read an esoteric Douglas Adams commentary without the element of humor. You know, "So long, and thanks for all the fish...and for Bush...little did the humanoids know that Obama was on the horizon..." The problem that I see with this type of logic is that it assumes that the reelection of Bush indirectly caused Katrina. Yes, Bush is beyond incompetent, and the vast majority of our country has finally realized that fact. But to say that Katrina would not have happened if Kerry had been in office? We'll never know the answer to that question. Yes, Kerry most likely would have been better than Bush, but Kerry lacked (and still lacks) a fundamental characteristic that drives the electorate: he never really seems genuine and authentic. I was thinking about this earlier today--how phony Kerry seemed at times during the 2004 campaign. He made good arguments. He "won" me when he argued during the second debate that a 15-year old girl who was being raped by her stepfather should have access to birth control and abortion services, even if it meant going behind her abusive parent's back. I liked his intellectualism, but I had a hard time accepting that he genuinely believed what he was saying.

But the bottom line is that the "This caused that" type of argument doesn't take into account that any number of factors could have turned the tides of history...and Katrina. What if Nagan had organized a better evacuation? I'm not blaming him for what happened, but I do think that Katrina was more complex than "Bush got elected and people died."

Yes, we need to change course. Yes, now is the time. There is no "later." We can't keep moving in the direction of the past eight years because we'll destroy ourselves in the process. And Obama is the right candidate at the right time. Kerry was the wrong candidate at the right time...or the right candidate at the wrong time...not sure which.

The best thing we can do is focus on the future and not dwell too much on speculative alternate histories. We can leave that to Harry Turtledove and the "What if" crowd while voters assert the mantra "Never again" in this seminal election.

OK. This horrible economic crisis is probably all my fault. You see, my friends, four years ago, I speculated to my friends that a Bush victory would actually lead to the end of Republicanism. My friends, of course, thought me daft but my reasoning was what you might call meta.

You see, fanatics are, by nature, incapable of self-restraint. When presented the levers of power, they will always go too far. Over reach. Around the bend. Off planet.

Little did I know that their demonstrated incompetence, at the time, would be a mere sideshow compared to the lunacies to come.

Forgive me, friends, for my prescience. BTW, mission accomplished.

Well, all this arguing about "was it good for Liberals" this or that isn't the real question. The real question was and IS: "Is it good for the United States"?

You can talk about short term vs long term a long time without ever getting anywhere.

Part of my own take on the entire Bush disaster is that it is a disaster not just for Bush, but ESPECIALLY it is a disaster for free-market conservatism. Whether we saw such and such in 2004 - who cares? But when we all look back on this period, we will see that free market ideas were allowed to be taken to their logical conclusion, and that conclusion HAD to be that greed and economic savagery would be the end result, and that would lead to collapse.

Now, if it never collapsed, would we ever EVER hear the end of laissez-faire this and free market that and trickle down this and Adam Smith's invisible hand that?

The answer to that is a resounding NO!!!!!

ONLY by having it go to its pure, unfettered logical conclusion could we all SEE that it was a TERRIBLE SYSTEM. And it is not only terrible for those of us who are not rich, who could see its horrible consequences across the board. IT GOT SO BAD THAT IT DESTROYED THE RICH, TOO.

Only by reaching its pure end result would we ever have it SMACK US IN THE FACE how goddawful free markets are, how horrible were those ideas about "government being the PROBLEM".

WE THE PEOPLE NEEDED THE GOVERNMENT TO PROTECT US AGAINST FREE MARKETS AND THE CORRUPTION AND GREED AND STUPIDITY THAT GO WITH FREE MARKETS.

Reaganism insisted that government be disemboweled.

Well, we got a gutless government and we found out that the rich raped us all. Unfettered capitalism led to disaster in 1929, and - in an almost carbon copy of it - led to the disaster in 2008. Only by dismantling the protections put in place after 1929 were the events of the last few years allowed to occur.

Until Reaganism/Freidmanism reached its climax we could never have seen clearly how terrible it is. If Kerry had gotten into the WH, we would still have the collapse in front of us, because it would not have been pure enough greed to show its true colors.

And until we SAW those true colors - the insanity that is a completely unfettered free market - we could never be ready to control it, AGAIN. We would still be wondering, "Does free market capitalism just SEEM bad for all of us, or are we just missing something?"

We NEED to see its evils clearly, before we can act decisively against it.

Free market capitalism is like alcoholism - it needs enablers in order for it (Daschle, Pelosi, Reid, Bill Clinton), it is all about egoism (greed in the case of capitalism), and it is a disaster that takes everyone around it down.

Hopefully, after TWO utter failures - 1929 and 2008 - capitalism's name will be so dirty that we will see it for the criminality that it is. For those who don't know, the same kind of greed led to the 1929 crash, even though the particular bubble-building mechanisms were different

Only a MIXED ECONOMY can allow prosperity while controlling the greed of human beings, so that it does not become an avalanche. Government MUST be our last line of defense - AND OUR FIRST LINE OF DEFENSE - against greed and corruption. Elements of capitalism MUST be controlled.

Could we be here if Kerry had been President since 2004? Not a chance. The Dems would STILL be a bunch of wusses. The Right would STILL be hammering Kerry and Liberalism. The 2006 election would never have resulted in a Democratic Congress.

And when our disaster came - possibly as late as 2020 - it would have been far worse.

How about we discuss whether the Democrats would have been better off with Clinton losing in '92? I mean really, why not?

Funny how the whole topic looks different when we talk about a situation where a Democrat actually won, as opposed to when one almost won but didn't. Winning is always preferable, isn't it? Seems like a no-brainer to me.

Obama is a very silver lining to the very dark cloud that was a Bush win in '04. That's the way I look at it. Anything else strikes me as ivory-tower conjecture.

If Kerry had won in 2004, then Alberto Gonzales would have never been Attorney General and the Justice Department wouldn't have been politicized to the point that the Justice Department can no longer be trusted to be an impartial arbiter of justice and the "rule of law" in our country.

If Kerry had won in 2004, the federal response to Hurricane Katrina would have been non-politicized and more timely, with the post-hurricane recovery effort also being non-politicized and more timely (and less wasteful). (Note: the national media has not yet picked up on how bungled the Bush administration's/FEMA's/DHS's response has been to the aftermath of Hurricane Ike along the Texas coast. Local Texas newspapers are reporting on Bush administration "promises" that have been reneged on, just like what happened during and after Hurricane Katrina).

The list goes on and on concerning how a Kerry/Edwards administration would have been far better for our nation than a second term in office for Bush the Dumb*ss and Cheney the Corrupt.

For instance, with Democrats heading federal agencies, there is a strong probability that this financial crisis would have been either stopped in time or at least mitigated to some extent, with a Kerry administration's response being a whole lot more sane and less wasteful of taxpayer dollars.

So, I'm not at all buying the argument that Kerry losing in 2004 was in any way good for our nation, especially when all the evidence over the past thirty years is that Republicans winning is extremely disastrous and harmful to our nation and the future of our nation's children, especially those middle-class and impoverished children in our society.

The only human attributes that conservative Republicans are competent at are lying, cheating and stealing...which has been proven over and over again by Bush, Cheney and the culture of corruption Republicans.

"kevin drum writes" -- ???

what the -- ??

if i wanted to read kevin drum @ the washington monthly, i'd get in my time machine and go back a few months!

Shorter Kevin Drum: "Don't mind me, I've OD'ed on stupid pills."

MNPundit:

"The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants."

Well, as long as we're making with the quotes, how about that one from Orwell about "the kind of person who is always somewhere else when the trigger is pulled"?

Christ.

This argument can be made much better for the 2000 election than the post 911 2004 one. I myself had this thought in the back of my mind in 2000. If you recall the Bush administration (i.e., the Mayberry Machiavellis) were cruising for a bruising what with Enron and sundry other evidence of a lack of any governing ability and all.

Which leads me to my main reluctance to dismiss this train of thought altogether. Your citation from Dana includes:

[S]uppose that the various problems facing the country are too big for set of liberal policies to make a meaningful difference.

skippy, take your time machine and go back about 28 years. Take the mess we're in today and apply it to Kerry---and then compare Kerry to Carter.

A Kerry WH would have been a Carter-2 WH, and at least a few of us remember the 12-year nightmare that followed. America lost its manufacturing might under Reagan/Bush-1; go look at the rusted remains of our steel mills, the rubble that used to be auto plants; the empty fields that were once tire factories. For every job lost under Bush-2, America lost 5 under Reagan/Bush-1.

Kerry would have been a disaster, and would have put the GOP---the ROVE GOP---in the catbird's seat for the next dozen years or so. Things would have gone from bad to worse, but the low-information voters would have constantly been reminded of that five-letter word---Kerry.

We could be looking at a McCain/Palin victory; most of us might never had heard of Barack Obama; every single Dem option to Kerry would be viewed by the majority as "just another Kerry."

I'm guessing that most of the comments here---the Drum-bashers---were in diapers when the 1980 elections rolled around. Seems to me that they still are, since they obviously haven't reached the age of studying history.

Or remembering it....

Bill Kristol just made the same argument for an Obama win. I guess it is another way of claiming you won when you didn't.

Disturbingly Kevin Drum appears to need a few loose screws tightened, because he is rapidly unraveling before our very eyes.

Perhaps it's something about the trauma of having to reset the clocks on four VCR's, which possibly he uses to record newscasts, that is unless he is still playing 8-tracks in his car. Someone should tell him about TIVO.

Drum has his head stuck somewhere in his anatomy it was never meant to go regarding Prop 1 -- high speed rail -- in CA.

Don't mean to trash him, because I used to respect his levelheadedness immensely. Lately, however, he has been making about as much sense as Limbaugh strung out on pain meds.

How could four less years of Bush possibly been anything but a blessing not only for this country but for the entire world?

Disturbingly Kevin Drum appears to need a few loose screws tightened, because he is rapidly unraveling before our very eyes.

Perhaps it's something about the trauma of having to reset the clocks on four VCR's, which possibly he uses to record newscasts, that is unless he is still playing 8-tracks in his car. Someone should tell him about TIVO.

Drum has his head stuck somewhere in his anatomy it was never meant to go regarding Prop 1 -- high speed rail -- in CA.

Don't mean to trash him, because I used to respect his levelheadedness immensely. Lately, however, he has been making about as much sense as Limbaugh strung out on pain meds.

How could four less years of Bush possibly been anything but a blessing not only for this country but for the entire world?

We had to leave the suburbs of New Orleans after Katrina and move to another city. We loved living there, and the trauma of Katrina and the Bush administration's non-response is something we will carry with us for the rest of our lives. I can't even approach the idea that all that suffering was somehow "worth it" to get to this point with this campaign. Needless suffering is never worth it.

We are just glad to vote against the Republicans again today. Peace.

Hilzoy: In 2004 we didn't know nearly enough to be able to predict this with certainty. If Kerry had won, he'd be the presumptive nominee this year, and if he had done reasonably well, we'd be looking at another four years of Democratic rule.

I love you Hilzoy, but the Leftie Loonies who backed Dr Dean knew in 2004 that Kerry sucked. We knew. And if he gotr elected, we also knew we'd have to back him up, and thus we'd have his suckiness covering our party like a fetid blanket.

Hilzoy: Did we know nearly enough, in 2004, to be able to say with certainty that the Democrats would win this time? I don't think so.

Actually we did, as much as that is possible. We had Howard Dean's example that someone would follow. Gotta have faith, sez this Atheist.

I'm sorry a lot of people died. I really am. It pisses me off NO END. But the country is too damn stupid to learn any other way and you know it. You can't refute that fact without resorting to illogical arguments like "tell that to the dying kids in Iraq".

FACT: We got Roosevelt's New Deal because we had the Great Depression. Without that catastrophe, the Roosevelt mandate would have never been able to form. It would have been killed by the corporate bastards who currently rule our world.

And now, we will have the Obama Renewal because people died in Iraq, New Orleans, and all over America. Because the economy has been hammered. Because the constitution has been raped. Because Kerry sucked. America had to endure Bush's reign because America is about half-filled with incredibly stupid and/or misinformed people.

It's very sad, but unfortunately some people do not learn except by being struck very hard upside the head with a 2x4. And it's the nature of political pendulums, you know; If they don't swing to the right far enough, they probably won't swing to the left far enough.

I just hope to hell the brilliant candidate we have now knows how important it is to bush the entire discussion to the left very hard, and to never give one inch to the rat bastards who think the center is just to the left of the Worst President Ever.

Peace.

I think about two other "What If" questions as well.

1. What if Gore had won in 2000? I read an interesting piece (possibly here) that surmised that Gore would not have been able to prevent 9/11 and then would have been impeached by the Congress. It is speculation, but an interesting insight.

2. Was Pelosi right keeping “impeachment off the table”? As much as I believe Bush and Cheney deserve impeachment, it would have become a rallying point for the republicans. Keeping it off the table may have allowed Obama to keep building his momentum and prevented the GOP from finding a solid issue to appeal to voters.

For some of us in 2004 it wasn't HOPING Kerry would lose it was having a strategy to live with it IF he lost...and that in large part was due to knowing that Bush would SCREW UP MORE...this time there is NOTHING to salve the disappointment if McShame and Scarah attain the POWER...

Stupidest. Hypothetical. Ever.

Whether Kerry winning or losing was better for liberalism? Are you serious? And the point this whole debate pivots on is the ascension of Obama now? When he hasn't served a day in office—never mind won yet—and there is not even a way of knowing whether or not he will be any good for liberalism, because it's the future and yet another hypothetical?

Jesus. Or as he would say, Jeebus—Drum can't hold Hilzoy's jock (or sports bra, as it were).

If you're willing to argue that we ought to be glad Kerry lost, then I think you ought to be willing to explain to the loved ones of someone who died as a result of our incompetent response why it was for the best that their loved one died.

THIS is (for Iraq as well as Katrina) the reason that stops me from looking at the bright side of a lost opportunity for a mediocre Clintonesque baby steps, pro-business Democratic reign.

Obama talks the talk of progressives.

The possibility exists that the US in 2012 will be better than it would have been under 2 terms of Kerry with no mandate and a Republican Congress.

The possibility remains that Obama will not compel Congress to do anything of substance either through a lack of sincerity in his words or Congress' fear of its own shadow and inertia in embracing the Clinton weather vane strategy of governance that lost both houses and the white house.

If you win, Obama, have guts.

Kerry ran a lackadaisical and ineffectual campaign. I can only think that he would have been a ineffectual president against a rabidly right-wing congress.

I will always vote for a Dem over a Rethug -- and not being able to foresee the future, I will be forced to assume that my choice enabled the best of all possible outcomes. However, a resounding victory for Obama will do the country more good and move the country further to the left, than a tepid victory for Kerry ever could. And that resounding victory for Dems probably wouldn't have happened if the Rethugs were able to blame everything on a Kerry presidency...