Losing by lsing: if the democrat wins, there will be few silver linings.

IF John McCain wins the election, he should send Rahm Emanuel a thank-you note. If the congressman had not succeeded in engineering a Democratic takeover of Capitol Hill in 2006, McCain would have very little shot at winning the presidency. Instead, he would be running to extend Republican dominance of a sour and angry country. The argument about drilling would be playing out very differently. High gas prices would still make energy policy the top issue in the election, but if Republicans had narrow majorities in Congress, they would be responsible for doing something about it--and they probably would not have the strength to pass a bill. Precisely because they cannot do much about it now, it is, paradoxically, easier for them to get a hearing for their argument, and thus move public opinion.

The success of the surge has made the Iraq War less of a liability for Republicans than it was in 2006. But would it have happened if Republican majorities had survived in that year's elections? Nervous congressional Republicans would still have had something to lose, so they would have cautioned against the initially unpopular policy. The Democrats would have faced fewer constraints in opposing it. The combination of a small, scared majority and a bold, irresponsible minority would probably have stopped the surge before it began. Progress in Iraq would have been much less likely, and a Republican defeat in the 2008 presidential race much more likely.

So political parties are sometimes lucky to lose elections. Would Republicans be lucky to lose the presidency in 2008? About once a week, I hear a Republican argue for that proposition. Sometimes the argument is made by a congressman, or somebody who works for one. They figure that they might be able to take control of the House in 2010 if Obama wins this year: Voters normally turn on the party in charge of the White House during midterm elections. Sometimes it is made by people who are unhappy with McCain or dissatisfied with the direction of the party: They think that it needs more punishment for its sins and that their vision for it would prevail after a big defeat. Some Republicans say they will sit out the election, withhold their contributions, or even vote for Obama in furtherance of these long-term goals.

By the same token, it is said that a McCain victory this year could well lead to Republican losses in 2010 and 2012. President McCain would not see strengthening the Republican party as part of his job, and he would govern with congressional Democrats in a way that would weaken it. Also, no party has held the White House for more than twelve years in a row since Harry Truman left office in 1953. McCain would have to pull off a massive and highly unlikely realignment for the 2012 election to be winnable.

So which is more important? The national election this November, or the next two? These things can be hard to judge even in retrospect. Republican defeat at the presidential level in 1992 led to the Republican takeover of Congress two years later, and thus to welfare reform, a halt in defense cuts, and a capital-gains tax cut. But the 1992 defeat also led to years of weakness in foreign policy, higher income-tax rates that have still not been entirely reversed, and the appointment of two liberal justices to the Supreme Court.

NO WIN, UNCERTAIN FUTURE

My vote is for 2008 as the most important upcoming election. Foreign policy is the first reason. As the last two years of the Bush administration have shown, a president, even an unpopular one, can drive foreign policy, even if an opposition fiercely opposed to his policy controls Congress. So a Republican congressional victory in 2010 would not undo the damage of an Obama victory in 2008. The resulting Congress would probably have even less effect on Obama than Speaker Pelosi has had on Bush; it's harder to make a president act than to stop him from acting.

While there may be more to Obama than the parody of foreign-policy liberalism he appears to be, in several telling episodes he has come across as weak and uncertain. During a Democratic debate, he pledged to meet with foreign dictators without precondition. Then he tried to elevate this debate tactic into something approaching a doctrine, and still later, after a backlash, he tried to modify his pledge into nothingness. I suspect his actual instincts were on display in the first two acts of this production. Negotiations with our enemies can under some circumstances be useful, but they are not goods in themselves. Like Clinton before him, Obama gives the impression of thinking that there is no problem his glibness cannot solve.

Or take his response to the Russo--Georgian conflict. Initially he urged the countries, like squabbling children, to get along. Even when he got tougher with Russia, he suggested that our violation of Saddam Hussein's sovereignty over Iraq had paved the way for Russia's action. Such naive legalism would be counterproductive at this unstable moment in global politics, and McCain would bring less of it to the table than Obama.

My second reason is judges. Supreme Court justice John Paul Stevens is 88; Ruth Bader Ginsburg is 75. Surely both would retire in order to let President Obama extend their liberal activism for several decades. David Souter, 69, might also retire. Don't count on Republican senators, who are certain to be in the minority, to block even Obama's most egregious nominees; almost all Republican senators voted for Bill Clinton's Supreme Court picks (Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer) in 1993 and 1994. Over the last few years, moreover, almost all Republican senators have gone on record saying that it is unconstitutional (or otherwise seriously wrong) to filibuster against judicial nominees.

In both these cases, a liberal would replace a liberal. But Justice Antonin Scalia is 72. So is Justice Anthony Kennedy. As unreliable a constitutionalist as he has been, Obama could find someone less reliable. Even if Obama merely kept the current liberal-conservative balance, Roe v. Wade would stay on the books for another generation. If he tilted it farther leftward, the Court would surely invent a constitutional right to same-sex marriage, reinvent one to partial-birth abortion, and make the death penalty a dead letter. And then: Mandatory voting rights for felons? Aright to euthanasia? The possibilities might not be limitless, but they would not be limited by the Constitution.

A Republican sweep in 2012, assuming it happened, would undo almost none of the damage. Even a dozen years of conservative appointments to the Court might not undo it. None of the major activist precedents of the Warren Court has been reversed.

Many conservatives worry about the judges McCain would appoint, and note, correctly, that some of the worst liberal activists of the last half century have been appointed by Republican presidents. But Republicans have had a higher success rate with their appointees as the conservative legal movement has gained experience. In the Senate, McCain has compiled a solid record on judges, having voted to confirm each Republican conservative and raised objections to several of the liberals. His decision in 2005 to compromise with the Democrats on the rules for filibustering Bush's judicial nominees may have been a mistake (as I think), but it does not give us any reason to believe that he secretly wants a liberal judiciary.

McCain may pick the wrong nominee, as Reagan sometimes did and any Republican might, or he may cut a bad deal with Senate Democrats. If so, it would mean only that some of his appointees turned out by accident to be as liberal as all of Obama's would be by design. Only one Democratic appointee of the last half century, Byron White, has not been a reliable liberal activist.

The third reason is health care. As James Capretta has pointed out in these pages (September 1), Obama's health-care plan is designed to evolve into a national healthinsurance program along the lines of Canada's. The resulting government monopoly or near-monopoly on health insurance would stifle innovation, require bureaucratic rationing, and infringe on freedom. But it would also move American politics permanently leftward.

When I have made this point before, left-wing writers--for example, Paul Krugman--have misunderstood it. They take me to be saying that national health care would be so successful that a grateful populace would give up its prejudices against big government. Not exactly. I have three other dynamics in mind.

First, the inevitable disappointments and failures of a nationalized system would just as inevitably be blamed on underfunding, creating a bidding war that liberals would usually win. On those occasions when voters understood that spending had to be controlled, they would prefer that liberals control it, so as to do the bare minimum necessary.

Second, the creation of a new health-care regime would alter the incentives for all the interest groups involved. In the short run, at least, squeezing money out of the government system would be more advantageous than abolishing it.

Third, the creation of a new system would make free-market alternatives look more radical to the public than they do now, because they would be more radical. The public's aversion to risk, which now hurts advocates of liberal policies as much as it helps them, would only help them.

So national health insurance could be a lasting political success for liberals even if it is a colossal policy failure; it could, indeed, succeed politically because of its failures. Liberals believe, correctly, that 2009 will be their best chance yet to get their way on health care. No domestic issue would be more important to a President Obama, and he would have a large Senate majority to work with.

Three other considerations make defeat this year look especially unattractive. First: You can't be sure that Obama would fail politically. He may inherit an economy that is recovering from a mid-boom slowdown. He may be able to preside over victory in Iraq.

Second: Those disaffected Republicans who hope that the party will move their way in defeat may be mistaken. Some of them must be, since they do not agree among themselves on what has gone wrong to date or what should be done in the future.

Third: The Senate looks especially bleak for conservatives over the next four years. Democrats are likely to pick up around five seats this year. In 2010, Republicans will have to defend 19 of the 34 seats up for election. Not until 2012 will Republicans have a real chance to regain ground. If we must have a liberal president, conservatives should prefer one who will have modest Democratic majorities from 2013 to 2017 to one with big ones from 2009 to 2013.

Conservatives who are tempted to sit this election out, or worse, on the theory that they can "win by losing" should think again. Better to win today.