What if he wins?

The Triumph of Anything Goes

By David Greenberg 

We all know that George W. Bush's reelection would probably bring about more illiberal policies regarding social justice, education, the arts, economic fairness, environmental protection, consumer rights, racial equality, foreign policy, civil liberties, and workers' rights. Less obvious, but perhaps as consequential over the long term, is how a Bush victory in November would change the fundamental practice of democracy in Washington. If the public were to award Bush a vote of confidence on the basis of his first-term record, it would amount to a ratification of the ruthless style and philosophy that have underpinned Bush's presidency--what Barack Obama at the Democratic Convention called "the politics of anything goes."

An oft-quoted quip of Bush's--"If this were a dictatorship, it'd be a heck of a lot easier, just so long as I'm the dictator"--certainly doesn't reflect may plan of his to abolish democratic procedures or principles. But it does reveal his impatience with those procedures and principles. Bush and his team have shown contempt for many of the bedrock elements of liberal democracy, including public access to information; a press that interrogates its leaders; a give-and-take between parties that represent different interests; a separation of powers among the executive, legislative, and judicial branches; the preference for reason over the use of force; and the support of legal safeguards to prevent the arbitrary exercise of power by the executive. They have routinely violated the bounds of acceptable political behavior in a democracy.

The instances of this misbehavior are so numerous as to fill a small book; indeed, they've already filled many such books. Yet the anything-goes attitude comprises more than the sum total of these instances. It's a philosophy, a set of premises and prejudices, that scorns deliberation and dissent, exalts brute power, drips with disrespect for the spirit (if not the letter) of the law, stiff-arms compromise, and mocks the popular will.

It's hard to find a better exemplar of this attitude than George W. Bush. Nonetheless, Bush himself remains only, the reigning figurehead of this philosophy. Since Newt Gingrich assumed the GOP leadership in the 1990s, and since the party became nearly congruent with the conservative movement, this strain of ruthlessness has come to permeate the Republican Party. Republican behavior during three major national traumas of late--the impeachment of Bill Clinton, the 2000 Florida election recount, and the invasion of Iraq--was strikingly similar: In each case, their leaders rammed ahead, using means fair and foul, to reach a preordained outcome. Each time, they brushed aside not just the doubts of the American public or other nations, not just inconvenient facts, but also concern about the law itself. For these reasons, Bush has been eliciting comparisons to Richard Nixon, the last president who showed such contempt for democratic procedures.

Because Nixon was foolish enough to record himself committing high crimes, we now think of Watergate as an episode in which, as the cliche goes, the system works. The flip side of that statement, however, is that the system almost failed. Certainly, just after Election Day 1972, when Nixon had routed George McGovern, many Americans were despairing that his thuggery would go unpunished. Talk of "repression" and "gangsterism," which had just months before seemed like so much New Left sloganeering, now approximated reality. And Nixon himself knew well that his 1972 victory strengthened his hand to wreak revenge. Throughout that fall, he spoke privately about the viciousness with which he would retaliate, once reelected, against his political foes on the left and in the press.

Something similar could happen following a Bush win this November. For the electorate to turn Bush out of office would be to proclaim that it rejects this manner of politics. But to award Bush another four years--provided he really wins this time--would signal that a majority of Americans not only tolerates but endorses his antidemocratic style. And it could be interpreted by Democrats as a lesson that resistance is futile.

Already, despite losing the popular vote, Bush has governed as if he'd won in a landslide. "From the very day we walked in the building, [there was] a notion of a sort of restrained presidency because it was such a close election," Cheney has said, "that lasted maybe 30 seconds." And with a Republican-controlled Supreme Court and Congress, Bush and Cheney faced few checks on their power.

Should Bush win a second term, the politics of anything-goes would only intensify--because it would no longer be seen as controversial. It would no longer be noteworthy that an administration declassifies documents to embarrass opponents, as when John Ashcroft released a memo by former Clinton administration official and 9/11 Commission member Jamie Gorelick. It would become more or less acceptable to threaten the jobs of bureaucrats who won't play ball in misleading Congress, as happened with chief actuary Richard Foster, who wanted to answer congressional questions about the price tag of the administration's Medicare plan. Or to toss aside legal and constitutional rights of the accused, as at Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib. Or to interfere with the public's right to know, as the administration did in ordering federal agencies to provide fewer records under the Freedom of Information Act.

Fifteen years ago, conservatives put forth the "broken windows" theory of crime. If small street crimes are tolerated, the theory went, neighborhoods begin to accept them as normal and the result is more lawlessness. The same thing will happen if a democracy tolerates Bush's ruthless behavior as business as usual. If voters validate this modus operandi, it won't just accelerate; it will cease to draw even the modest level of scrutiny and outrage that the administration's transgressions have attracted so far. Failing to protest these breaches of the norms that govern political conduct will encourage more such violations.

Historically, second-term presidents have gotten cocky and overreached: Franklin D. Roosevelt with his court-packing plan, Nixon with Watergate (which began in his first term), Ronald Reagan with Iran-Contra. But no law of history decrees that the system always corrects itself. With no independent counsel and no Democratic Congress to investigate, with a press cowed into submission, with a court system loaded with Federalist Society apparachiks, who will restrain Bush's ruthless agenda? Only the people. And the only time they can do it is on Nov. 2.

David Greenberg is a professor at Rutgers University, a columnist for Slate, and the author of Nixon's Shadow: The History of an Image.

The Plutocrats Go Wild

By James K. Galbraith 

Next year's economic difficulties are already on the horizon. Growth is slowing as the housing market cools and consumers rein in their spending, inflation is rising a bit, driven mainly by oil prices, health care costs, and corporate price increases, fueling a spectacular recent profit surge. Job creation is weak, and wages are flat. This is the new stagflation--an unpleasant reminder of the economic cost of unilateral war.

But George W. Bush has never tried to fix the economy in the short term. His focus is on making long-term--and, he hopes, irreversible--changes to taxes and social programs; foreign policy; and the government's capacity to regulate the environment, natural resource use, and corporate behavior.

Bush's top economic priority has always been to cut taxes on the wealthy; as he famously said, the "have-mores" are his political base. The marginal income-tax rate, the estate tax, the tax on dividends, and the proceeds of the profits tax all fell sharply in his first term. His second term could finish the job, shifting the tax base to consumption, perhaps even abolishing the income tax for a value-added tax (as Republican Speaker Dennis Hastert now suggests). Virtually the whole tax burden will then fall on the middle class, on working Americans, and on the poor.

As revenues fall, spending programs will come under new attack. But not defense spending: The Pentagon's budget will remain inviolate. Indeed, the military may demand still more spending, as the true costs of stabilizing Iraq gradually become clear. New arms races--with North Korea over missiles and missile defense--and new conflicts, perhaps with Iran or China, may come into view. We will need many more soldiers and much more money if such conflicts occur.

And so, given the budget deficits ahead, the battle royal will be fought over what remains of federal social spending. With Alan Greenspan at his side, Bush will challenge Congress to slice, dice, and eviscerate. The privatization of Social Security--an invisible issue right now--will surely resurface once the votes are safely cast in November.

Meanwhile Greenspan will try to steer between a cost-driven price inflation and a sagging labor market. Should he raise interest Pates or hold the line? The Fed started boosting rates just before the recent spate of bad economic news revealed slower growth, weak job gains, slumping consumer spending, and falling producer prices. This shows that its insight into our present problems isn't deep.

Indeed, the Fed is driving blind. Greenspan is aiming for a "natural interest rate"--a hypothetically neutral interest rate that would neither stimulate nor retard growth or inflation--whose value, as he admits, he doesn't know. How this idea came to dominate Fed thinking isn't clear: The concept is a throwback to the economics of a century ago and is the basis of almost no modern research. But we do know that higher interest rates will mean more pressure on debt-ridden households, slower consumer spending growth, and stagnant or falling stock prices--as anyone can see.

Bush's second term may see a crisis of the dollar, now heavily reliant on reserve-asset stockpiling by China and Japan, which own a huge proportion of our debt paper. In effect, those countries are sending us cheap goods in return for expensive paper, working hard for no current material reward. Will they continue this odd behavior for four more years, even if tensions erupt over Korea or Taiwan? Or will China, especially, diversify into cures, or perhaps into commodities, aggravating global inflation? Will the neglected states of Latin America, increasingly alienated from the United States, set off a banking crisis with debt defaults? We'll see. The dangers are real, and we are totally unprepared.

All of this brings to mind the late 19th century, a time of budding empires, rapacious trusts, Social Darwinism, and populist upheaval; when economic battles raged over plutocracy and consumption taxes, chronic unemployment, rising poverty, and financing wars of conquest; and when the world economy was dominated by financial panics and the commodity cycle. George Bush and his allies have been modeling themselves on William McKinley, the champion of vested interests in the Gilded Age.

Fortunately for America, McKinley was succeeded by Teddy Roosevelt, a progressive Republican who fought the monopolies and favored the environment, and then by Woodrow Wilson, a Democrat who brought us the income tax and inspired the search for a global system of collective security. True, it took another generation to break finally with rule by the corporate rich. But eventually, there did come the Great Depression and Franklin Roosevelt, who gave us public works, Social Security, the National Labor Relations Act, and the SEC.

The cozy plutocracy of McKinley and his successors--Taft, Harding, Coolidge, Hoover--could not stand before the needs of the modern world. It can't be brought back now. Bush's effort to do so will bring misery for many, perhaps for many years. But the final outcome is not in doubt. Bush's second term, if it comes, will fail, and America will thereafter change course; democracy and common sense will assert themselves in the end.

James K. Galbraith is Lloyd M. Bentsen Chair in Government/Business Relations at the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs, The University of Texas at Austin, and chair of Economists Allied For Arms Reduction (www.ecaar.org).

The Democratic Party is Toast

By Grover Norquist 

The modern Democratic Party cannot survive the reelection of President George W. Bush and another four years of Republican control of both Congress and the White House.

No brag. Just fact.

The modern Democratic Party, is the party of government. Its growth is the health of the state--and vice versa. Over time, all the party's building blocks are dependent on continuous support and reinforcement by the power of the central government. Trial latter money is now a major part of the Democratic Party, but it is wholly dependent on legislators and courts maintaining the present tort laws that allow lawyers to interject themselves into and all contracts and relationships. They siphon off some $240 billion a year--$40 billion of which stays with a few thousand lawyers. Labor unions, once the godfather of the Democratic Party but now displaced by the richer and more photogenic trial lawyers, cannot maintain their $8 billion in compulsory union dues without the laws that make such payments mandatory. Both wings of the dependency movement--those locked into welfare dependency and the bureaucrats who get paid well to manage others' dependency (and make sure none of them get jobs and become Republicans) are wholly dependent on legislators halting further welfare reform. Big city political machines thrive on federal grants and state-granted powers. And the coercive utopians--the radical environmentalists, animal-rights activists, feminists, and others who would use stare power to force on us tiny non-flushable toilets and ears too small to hold families, take away the circus and our pet cats, and otherwise impose more fussbudget impositions on our lives than Leviticus--all depend on government grants to use and misuse federal and state power.

But outside state power, the Democratic coalition withers and dies. Without effective control of the government, the Democratic Party is like a fish out of water, a vampire in the sun, Antaeus held aloft, an appliance unplugged. In the past, the Democratic Party could afford to lose the presidency and remain connected to its source of power--the state--through control of the ][ louse of Representatives, and often the Senate as well. Little damage was done to the structure of the Democratic Party during the interregnums of the Eisenhower, Nixon, and George H.W. Bush administrations, because their moves could be checkmated by a Democratic Congress. With the end of 40 years of Democratic gerrymandering, states in which a majority of the congressional popular vote goes to the GOP now award a majority of congressional seats to the GOP, too. Republican-led redistrict hag in Texas will add an additional five to seven Republican House seats over the next few cycles. Redistricting in Texas and throughout the country ensures that Republicans will continue to control the House through 2012. Over time, the Senate--thanks to those wonderful square states out west--will trend toward 60 Republicans as the 30 red states elect Republicans and the 20 blue states elect Democrats. The anomaly of four Democratic senators hailing from Republican North and South Dakota will come to an end, as will the Republican-held Senate scat in Rhode Island.

With Democrats lacking a beachhead in Congress, four more years of Republican governance with President Bush in the White House will badly damage each of the pillars of the Democrat establishment. In the first term, the Bush Labor Department wrote modern, clear, and updated regulations as to who earns overtime pay and when and how. Trial lawyers had used archaic and unclear rules to sue companies claiming that workers who had been salaried for decades should actually have been considered hourly workers all those years and subject in overtime pay. Dozens of similarly unclear federal rules have been fodder for trial lawyer enrichment. Simply rewriting regulations to make them clear to all will cost the trial lawyers hundreds of millions of dollars.

Other shifts in national policy will also occur. Abroad, four more years under President Bush will move America and the world towards greater free wade, spreading prosperity throughout the world and bringing more countries into the trading systems that require property rights and rule of law, draining the swamps that breed radicalism and terror. At home, a second Bush administration will permanently abolish the death tax, which not only threatens to confiscate up to half of your parents' lifetime earnings, but also leads to the creation of Rockefeller, Carnegie, and Ford Foundations that inevitably are taken over by liberal bureaucrats. And a steady increase in the number of honest gun owners will continue to reduce street crime and make America safer. We now have 38 states with "shall issue" concealed carry laws, and Bush just signed a law to allow all cops and retired cops to carry, their guns across state lines. Over the next four years, Congress will bring such sanity to Washington, D.C., and expand the number of Americans who can carry across state Lines. Less crime means fewer prison guards and parole officers, shrinking the government workforce which tends to he 10 percent more Democrat and less Republican. Solving problems without hiring a lot of government workers is a virtuous cycle.

We'll also be able to shrink the number of government workers already on the payroll. Over the next few years, a high number of middle managers in federal and state governments will become eligible for retirement, allowing government at all levels to reduce the middle management bloat that the private sector shed in the 1980s--but through painless attrition rather than bitter mass layoffs. This will save taxpayers billions and make government more competent and accountable. Meanwhile, four more years of GOP control means four more years where labor laws are not changed to force workers to pay dues to join unions they don't wish to join. Twenty-two states have Right to Work laws to limit compulsory unionism; that number will grow, and the decline of labor unions from 33 percent of the workforce in the 1950s to 20 percent in 1980 to 13 percent today will continue. Every worker who doesn't iota the union is another worker who doesn't pay $500 a year to organized labor's political machine.

Four more years of President Bush will also accelerate one of the most important demographic changes in America over the past 20 years: the number of Americans who own stock. In 1980, only 20 percent of adults owned stocks in mutual finds, 401ks, IRAs and direct contribution pensions. Today, that number is over 60 percent and growing. Bush wants to create Retirement Savings Accounts to allow every American to sock away up to $5,000 for retirement tax-free; similarly, the president has proposed Lifetime Savings Accounts allowing Americans to save $7,500 for education, housing, or health costs during their working lives. Every American who owns his own mutual fund is decreasingly susceptible to the siren call of class warfare. (How did Dick Gephardt do this primary season?) According to pollster Scott Rasmussen, if you own $5000 in stock you are 18 percent less likely to be a Democrat and more likely to be a Republican. Every demographic group, including race, gender, age, and income, becomes more Republican with stock ownership. Four more years of more and bigger individual retirement accounts, heath savings accounts, RSAs, and LSAs means four more years of more Republicans and fewer Democrats.

Last, a Bush-Cheney victory in November will create the conditions for a constructive contest among leading Republican governors and senators for the presidential nomination in 2008. Dick Cheney's heart troubles mean that he will retire with Bush in 2009. Usually the sitting vice president is the natural enemy of all ambitious politicians of his party but now all Republicans want a Bush-Cheney victory in 2004, so they can run for an open presidential ticket in 2008. The Democrats face the opposite dilemma: Every ambitious Democrat hopes Kerry-Edwards fails, so that the presidency will open for her (or him) in 2008 rather than in 2012, 2016, or 2020. A Bush Cheney win will lead to Republican governors from Colorado, Mississippi, Florida, Texas, Massachusetts, Minnesota, and New York to compete to be the most Reaganite governor--a positive result no matter who wins. And a Bush-Cheney win in 2004 will leave Terry McAuliffe and Bill and Hillary in complete and unchallenged control of the Democratic Party at least through 2008. This is good for the Republicans, if not the republic.

Grover Norquist is president of Americans For Tax Reform and serves on the boards of director of the American Conservative Union and the National Rifle Association 

The Scandals Finally Break

By Kevin Drum 

What do we have to look forward to if George W. Bush is elected to a second term? One word: scandal.

Don't believe me? Consider the highlight reel of reelected presidents over the past 50 years. Ike won a second term and watched in dismay as his chief of staff was forced to resign over a vicuna coat. Richard Nixon buried George McGovern in 1972 and then resigned a year and a half later when Watergate finally caught up to him. Ronald Reagan sweated out his second term wondering if he'd be impeached over Iran-Contra. Bill Clinton didn't have to wonder: Two years after his reelection, he was defending himself in the first impeachment trial in over a century.

Coincidence? Don't believe it. There are three good reasons to think that second terms naturally lend themselves to scandal, and George Bush is almost preternaturally vulnerable in every one of them. Let's count them off.

First, power corrupts. It's a truism that as leaders become used to the idea that no one can really hold them to account, they increasingly push the envelope of acceptable behavior and eventually push too far. Not just in America, but in practically every democracy, this inevitably leads to abuses of power that eventually turn into scandals both small and large.

George Bush is more susceptible than most to this dynamic. Partly this is because his party controls Congress, so he has no real political oversight to keep him honest. But it's also because both Bush and the current Republican Party leadership have already demonstrated a ruthlessness and disregard for traditional political norms unseen since Nixon was jotting down his enemies list: holding open votes while they bully recalcitrant colleagues, ramming through midterm redistricting, suspending the Freedom of Information Act in all but theory, and cavalierly hiding routine budget data from Congress--all combined with a general mania for secrecy that leaves even John Dean in awe. It's a dangerous and intoxicating brew, and George Bush has demonstrated the combination of ruthlessness, siege mentality, and religious faith in his own righteousness that makes it almost inevitable that he will take a step too far.

Second, there's the problem that second terms are, well, second terms. It takes more than two or three years for a serious scandal to unfold, and problems that start to surface midway through a president's first term usually reach critical mass midway through his second term, a phenomenon that shrewd political observer Kevin Phillips calls "the sixth -year itch." It's like a political SAT: What's the next year in the series 1958, 1974, 1986, 1998?

You don't have to be a math whiz to know that 2006 is the next stop./Mid once again, George Bush is especially vulnerable to this since his first term already has several good candidates for scandals waiting to flower. 'Fake your pick: Valerie Plame? The National Guard? Aim Ghraib? Intelligence failures? Or maybe something that hasn't really crossed anybody's radar screen yet, sort of like the "third-rate burglary" at the Watergate Hotel that no one took seriously in 1972.

Third, there's the fact that scandals tend to take center stage during second terms because there's nothing to draw attention away from them. In 2000, for example, Bush ran on a platform of education reform, Medicare prescription benefits, and tax cuts--9/11 added the Iraq war as a fourth signature issue. But what's left for a second term? Education and Medicare are done deals, even most Republicans understand that tax cutting has gone as flat as it can, and no one expects Bush to start another war.

This leaves a dangerous void, and so far Bush has done nothing to fill it, campaigning almost entirely on his record in the war on terror. He will surely toss out a few new issues during and after the Republican convention, but it's obvious his heart isn't really in them. What's more, it also isn't clear if any of his likely pet projects--Social Security privatization or tort reform, for example--can generate much congressional enthusiasm.

If Osama bin Laden detonates a suitcase nuke in Los Angeles, all bets are off, of course. That aside, the most likely course is a continuing low-level insurgency in Iraq, a mediocre economy, and a halfhearted second-term agenda from the White House. If you combine that with a thin legislative majority, an outraged Democratic Party, and a public increasingly leery of Bush's Texas-style conservatism, what you get--aside from a few rancorous battles over Supreme Court nominations--is a presidency adrift.

It's the perfect breeding ground for a major scandal, and George Bush is exactly the right guy, with exactly the right personality, to step right into it.

Kevin Drum is a Washington Monthly contributing writer and the author of the magazine's blog, Political Animal, at www.washingtonmonthly.com

The Empire Strikes Out

By Gideon Rose 

Many people seem to think the upcoming presidential election will inevitably send American foreign policy down one of two radically different paths. Writing in the Atlantic, for example, the political commentator Michael Barone argues that this year's balloting may he the "most important in generations" since the Bush team would see reelection as a vindication of its aggressive course while a Kerry administration would end up kowtowing to Europe and the United Nations. Similar views echo from The Nation to the National Review.

Pish posh. Sure, there would be some differences between what the two camps would do, both in style (a lot) and substance (a little). But the similarities would be far more pronounced because Bush and Kerry's current positions on major issues just aren't that far apart--and because whoever is elected will have relatively little morn for maneuver. The last few years have constituted a grand experiment, a test of what would happen if Washington threw out the standard foreign-policy playbook and just winged it. The results are now in, and they ratify most of the conventional wisdom that the Bush administration initially rejected. And although Bush and his lieutenants will never say as much publicly, and may not even admit it to themselves in private, their recent behavior shows that at some level they understand the point and don't want to be burned again.

The much-touted "Bush doctrine" is a dead letter, with each of its three pillars--preemption, regime change, and clear division between those "with us" and "with the terrorists"--now discredited and abandoned. What the administration meant by preemption, of course, was really preventive war, a concept whose poor reputation has been reinforced by the failure to find WMDs in Iraq together with the high costs and mixed results of the bungled occupation. True preemption--striking out first against an enemy whose own blow is imminent or already on the way--is still an option for American policymakers, as it always has been, but it will be adopted only in the extraordinarily rare case where there is strong, timely, and actionable intelligence that such a threat actually exists.

The second pillar, regime change, was based on the idea that problems abroad stem from the nature of certain foreign governments and can be fully solved only by replacing them with something better. Today, that remains what it was during the Cold War: a worthwhile goal unmatched by a practical strategy for achieving it. The administration's proudest boast regarding the cot lateral benefits of the Iraq war, for example, is that the invasion cowed Libya into giving up its nuclear ambitions. But even if one overlooks the fact that Libya was already moving in that direction and allows the claim, the case still qualifies as a victory for traditional coercive diplomacy rather than any novel or highly principled approach to international politics. What changed was neither the Libyan ruler nor the odious nature of his regime, but simply one important aspect of his behavior. The Bush administration was right to cut the deal, but the whole episode reflects a rejection of its stated principles rather than a triumph for then.

And as for dividing the world between friends and foes, the Bush team--like all ins predecessor--has found itself struck dealing regularly with those inconvenient cases in the middle. Pakistan and Saudi Arabia are both crucial contributors to the problems the United States faces in the greater Middle East and crucial allies in combating them. China is both an authoritarian rising power aid a major U.S. trading partner which is gradually liberalizing. Europe can be both a royal pain and a vital source of support. The Bush administration has learned the hard way that the world is full of gray areas and that an inability to "do nuance" is not an asset but a liability.

None of this was shocking news, since it represents nothing more than what is, or should lie, taught in Diplomacy and National Security 101. But for sonic reason the Bush team needed remedial education, and by and large it took. Administration officials now rarely chatter blithely about transforming the world, and when they do, the words are safety unencumbered by substance. They no longer speak contemptuously of "Old Europe" or the United Nations, and even ask both for help on occasion. And they no longer muse about which nations might be next on the target list, disappointing their most fervent nonconservative supporters as often as they please them.

Some of these changes have been driven by politics at home, with the administration deciding that its electoral prospects depended at least partly on reassuring swing voters of its sobriety and competence. But most of the shifts have occurred because reality proved less tractable than administration ideologues guessed, and traditional approaches to foreign policy sounder. That is why the most likely scenario for a Bush second term is not a return to the vigor and recklessness of 2001-2003, but a continuation of the de facto muted realism the administration has displayed in 2004.

September 11 has set a floor on isolationism below which American foreign policy will not sink, and Iraq a ceiling on adventurism above which it will not rise. A Kerry administration would thus probably stay the course on most matters while benefiting from not having to disguise its policies in order to avoid charges of inconsistency and from foreign satisfaction at the Bush administration's departure.

Style does matter, and so similar substance delivered in a less abrasive manner would yield somewhat better results. But the major problems the United States faces have no easy solutions, and other countries will not be eager to sacrifice their own blood and treasure just in help reduce our existing burdens. Iraq is unlikely to stabilize itself quickly no matter who occupies the White House; Iran and North Korea are unlikely to abandon their nuclear programs, or Israelis and Palestinians their mutual enmity, if a Democrat is elected. Enough damage has been done to America's image and reputation, moreover, that in foreign affairs as in fiscal matters the hangover from the current administration's signature policies will linger for several years, constricting choices regardless of the election result.

Gideon Rose is the managing editor of Foreign Affairs

Hoover's Court Rides Again

By Cass R. Sunstein

If President Bush is reelected, he may appoint as many as four Supreme Court justices. He is likely to appoint hundreds of judges to the lower courts. What would happen?

Here's one clue. The last quarter-century has seen a determined, serf-conscious, and highly-organized effort to reshape the federal judiciary. The effort has been astonishingly successful, producing a radical shift in a little over two decades. As a result of that shift, what was considered conservative in 1980 is now considered moderate; what was then moderate is now liberal; what was then liberal is now absent; and what was then reactionary is now conservative (and entirely mainstream).

Here's another clue. In the last few years, right-wing activists have become far more ambitious. There is a great deal of talk about restoration of the "Constitution in Exile"--the Constitution as it existed in 1932, before President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's New Deal. Under this Constitution, the powers of the national government were sharply limited. The National Labor Relation Act of 1935, not to mention the Civil Rights Act of 1964, would have been impermissible. Under the Constitution in Exile, rights to have recourse against discrimination, and to protection of privacy, were minimal. A far more significant right was freedom of contract, which threw minimum-wage legislation into constitutional doubt. The Supreme Court tends to move slowly, and under a second Bush term, it would not adopt the Constitution of 1932; but it would probably move in that direction.

For many people, the most pressing issue is the fate of Roe v. Wade and women's right to choose. In 1992, the Relinquist court cut back on the ruling but preserved its core, by a narrow 5-to-4 vote. New Bush appointments might well lead the court to return the issue to the states. More broadly, a newly constituted court would be unsympathetic to any claim that the Constitution protects sexual and reproductive liberty from state intervention.

But if several appointments are made under an extended Bush presidency., the new court would likely do much more. It might strike down most campaign-finance reform. It would probably be inclined to invalidate parts of the Endangered Species Act and the Clean Water Act as beyond Congress' authority. It might well elevate commercial speech to the same status as political speech--thus forbidding controls on commercials by tobacco companies, among others. It would probably limit congressional efforts to protect disabled people, women, and the elderly from various forms of discrimination. More radically, it might interpret the Second Amendment so as to reduce the power of Congress and the states to enact gun-control legislation.

Suppose that there aren't many new appointments to the Supreme Court and that these radical developments don't occur. Tim consequences of a second Bush term would still be huge, simply because of its effects on the lower courts, where the vast majority of cases are decided. On the courts of appeals, Republican appointees are far more likely to strike down environmental regulations; uphold restrictions on abortion; invalidate campaign finance laws; and reject claims by those complaining of sex discrimination, sexual harassment, and discrimination on the basis of disability. (Notably, there is no difference between Republican and Democratic appointees in criminal cases; the latter aren't "softer on crime.") Where the political parties differ, the votes of federal judges of different parties often differ, too.

These differences aren't only about legal victories and losses. They're about the very meaning of the law, including the Constitution itself. Court of appeals rulings are accompanied by opinions that operate as precedents; these help settle the law for the future. The Americans with Disabilities Act, for example, is highly ambiguous; Republican appointees tend to read it narrowly, as a limited intrusion into the marketplace, whereas Democratic appointees tend to read it as providing broader protection for disabled people. So, too, with laws protecting the environment. These can be interpreted narrowly or broadly, and their meaning is effectively determined through judicial interpretation. Judges aren't mere ideologues; they follow the law. But in cases of reasonable doubt, the political party of the appointing president makes all the difference. President Reagan was able to produce a large-scale shift in understanding of the law, simply through his appointments; President Bush may well receive a chance to do the same.

This point actually understates the matter. Republican appointees tend to be conservative in their voting patterns. But they become far more conservative, and far more extreme, when they are sitting on a three-member court that consists only of Republican appointees. Here's one example: Republican appointees vote in favor of industry challenges to environmental regulations about half the time--but sitting only with other Republicans, they vote in favor of such challenges about three-quarters of the time!

Democratic appointees am greatly affected by sitting with Republican appointees. When Democratic appointees serve with two Republican appointees on three-judge panels, they show quite conservative voting patterns--about the same, remarkably enough, as the overall patterns of Republican appointees.

The upshot is that if President Bush has four more years, he will be able to ensure that Democratic appointees usually serve with two Republicans--and that there will be a large number of all-Republican panels. And for that very reason, he will be able to produce another massive shift in the federal judiciary. The Constitution in Exile--Herbert Hoover's Constitution--isn't likely to be restored; but don't be surprised if you see significant movement in its direction.

Cass R. Sunstein is a professor at the University of Chicago and author of The Second Bill of Rights.

Vengeance is His

By Paul Begala 

A president who unveils his ideas for his second term in the last hundred days of his reelection campaign is admitting that he has no new ideas for the next four years. So why is George W. Bush bothering to run again, anyway? Perhaps to justify what he sees as accomplishments--principally, tax cuts for the rich and the occupation of Iraq. Perhaps for the chance to one-up his dad as a two-term President Bush. But I believe much of his second term will be given over to another motive--one that's more personal and political:

Vengeance.

If George W. Bush is given a second term, and retains a Republican Congress and a compliant federal judiciary, he and his allies are likely to embark on a campaign of political retribution the likes of which we haven't seen since Richard Nixon.

How do I know this? I'm from Texas. Again and again, I've seen Bush turn a blind eye as his henchmen have leveled zealous attacks against his political enemies--assaults which the president himself has sometimes directly encouraged. Perhaps most disturbing, the subjects of these attacks have often been longtime Bush allies who ended up on the president's enemies list for minor slights.

Back home Bush had no better Democratic buddy than House Speaker Pete Laney, a quintessential Texas good ol' boy who ran the House through his mastery of both procedure and policy. Together with the late Lt. Gov. Bob Bullock, Laney was responsible for Bush's success as Texas governor. (The governor of my state has little real power, but Bush teamed ably and admirably with Laney and Bullock.)

After the Supreme Court handed the 2000 election to Gov. Bush, it was Pete Laney who let him address the nation from the chamber of the Texas House of Representatives, even introducing Bush as a bipartisan healer. Bush made a point of praising Laney, whom he called "my friend."

Two and a half years later, Bush's "friend" was holed up in Ardmore, Okla, in a vain attempt to stop a bone-crunchingly partisan redistricting of Texas that could not have been brought about without the approval of his buddy George. The congressional map was redrawn just two years after the last redistricting--not because population patterns had shifted, but because political power had shifted. When Democrats fled the state to prevent legislative action on the redistricting plan, the Texas .Rangers were called in to track them down. And when the Rangers couldn't find the Democrats, the Republicans called in President Bush's federal Department of Homeland Security, which found them by tracing Laney's private plane.

Today Pete Laney is no longer Speaker--with Bush's help, Republicans took over the Texas Legislature--and now Pete is in the fight of his life, running in a new, Republican district created with the support of his old buddy.

Thanks, George.

Laney's story is especially upsetting because Bush tried to destroy someone who had never crossed him--simply for the crime of being a Democrat.

Tony Sanchez's story is different. He actually dared to run against Bush's handpicked successor. The son of a typewriter repairman, Sanchez is a great American success story; rising from days packing produce on the Mexican border to eventual success in the very areas that had disappointed Bush: in the oil patch and, later, in banking. In 1994, Sanchez donated $300,000 to Bush's campaign, making him one of Bush's leading Democratic supports and putting him in league with Ken Lay as one of the largest patrons of Bush's early political career.

Sanchez stood by Bush when he ran for reelection, and then when he ran for president. But he just couldn't stomach Rick Perry; Bush's lieutenant governor, who took over when Bush went to Washington. So Sanchez decided to run himself, perhaps naively thinking his old pal George might be neutral in a pace between his lieutenant governor and his most prominent Hispanic supporter.

Fat chance.

Bush not only actively campaigned for Perry, but he also allowed Perry's goons to run vicious ads against Sanchez. They portrayed Sanchez as somehow complicit in the 1985 torture and murder of DEA agent Kiki Camarena because during the 1980s, drug dealers used Sanchez's bank (as they did most banks on the border) without his knowledge.

What the ads did not mention is that Sanchez helped federal authorities bust the bad guys, and earned the praise of the Reagan Justice Department. In fact, when the ads ran, David Almaraz, the DOJ official who handled the investigation, denounced them, saying, "Perry's claim is absolutely preposterous and completely false, without any foundation and fact."

But Sanchez's vast fortune was no match for good old-fashioned Texas racism. Do the math: Mexican American plus rich plus bank plus drugs equals disaster. Sanchez was crushed in the 2002 election.

We don't have to wonder what George W. Bush might do with four more years in the most powerful job on earth--and with no future campaigns to curb his enthusiasm. He's already countenanced the abuse of the federal anti-terror agency to hound Pete Laney. He's already smiled approvingly as racist ads were run against Tony Sanchez. And he's made vengeance a top priority in Washington already.

A prime example is the White House's treatment of Tom Daschle in late 2001. Up until that point, Daschle had been an amiable partner, working with Bush to craft compromises on several important early pieces of legislations and standing strong behind Bush after September 11. In those dark and desperate days, Daschle even earned a public hug from Bush on national television. But in November 2001, Daschle successfully blocked a Bush-backed "economic stimulus" bill which would have, among other things, given a quarter billion dollar tax cut to Enron.

Bush was mad. Just after Thanksgiving 2001, he directed his staff to attack Daschle publicly; shortly thereafter, everyone from Ari Fleischer to the National Review to the editorial page of The Washington Times pushed the White House line that Daschle was an "obstructionist." Rush Limbaugh did them one better: on his radio show, he started calling the Senate Majority Leader "Puff Daschle" and "El Diablo." The GOP attack machine funded aggressive, anti-Daschle ads in South Dakota--an unprecedented direct assault by a president against a sitting leader of the Senate. One particularly egregious ad, which complained that Daschle's opposition to drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Reserve threatened our national security, featured a photograph of Daschle next to one of Saddam Hussein.

Who will be the next unlucky enemy targeted under a second Bush term? I'd put my money on any Democratic swing-state legislator who seeks to accommodate him. Moderates like Evan Bayh (D-Ind.) and Max Bancus (D-Mont.) might feel an even greater political imperative to accommodate Bush on his second-term agenda--from further tax cuts to privatizing social security--but if history is any guide, he will simply pocket their support and then viciously attack them. That, after all, was the fate of former Sen. Max Cleland who supported Bush's tax cuts and the war in Iraq. All he got for his goodwill was a ruthless general election campaign engineered by the national GOP on behalf of Saxby Chambliss, who ended up taking Cleland's seat after attack ads charged that the Vietnam triple amputee was soft on national security.

If Democrats are smart, they will instead steal a page from the playbooks of Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) and the late senator Paul Wellstone (D-Minn.). In the midst of tough midterm election challenges in heavily contested swing-states, both politicians stood up to Bush. Although the GOP attack machine whirred into action, it sputtered and failed against Harkin and Wellstone. Even voters who disagreed with them on some issues admired their independence. Harkin won his race easily, and Wellstone was well out in front when he died in a plane crash. Their toughness should provide a model to other targeted Democrats, even in states with split constituencies: In modern politics, as in war, there's simply nothing to be gained by accommodating the enemy.

Bush sees the world in black and white. You're either for him or against him; a saint or a sinner; a friend or a foe. If given four more years in the White House, there's little doubt that the politics of retribution and bitter partisanship will dominate every day.

Paul Begala, a former counselor to President Bill Clinton, is co-host of "Crossfire," CNN's political debate program.

Bush Becomes a Moderate, Really

By Mickey Edwards and Nancy Sinnott Dwight

Despite his frequent talk of "compassionate conservatism" and a promised commitment to an expansive domestic agenda, George W. Bush's first term in the White House has been shaped by war and deep partisan divisions that often made him seem as if he were Ronald Reagan's son, pursuing ambitious if controversial goals, rather than the son of George H.W. Bush, who was known, and sometimes ridiculed, for his lack of interest in what he called "the vision thing."

If the president were now rolling to the easy victory many predicted after the attacks of September 11, 2001, he likely would see his reelection as a validation of the conservative policies of his first term. Instead, this man, who has always taken pride in seeing himself as a kind, caring, and decent leader who worked easily with political opponents as governor of Texas, has found himself the target of deep and widespread anger. Thus, caught in the controversy of his decisions over war and taxes, President Bush will enter a second term viewing his reelection as a second chance, something voters denied his father in 1992, rather than a mandate for a socially conservative and singularly aggressive agenda.

President Bush's second-chance presidency will be his opportunity to shape his legacy through a mixture of optimism, vision, values, and opportunity. The man who campaigned for office as a "uniter, not a divider" is almost certain to make outreach--to domestic opponents and foreign critics alike--the modus operandi of term, two. While he is unlikely to shift dramatically from his conviction that threats to national security must be met head on, the last half of 2004 included efforts at personal diplomacy that are vaguely reminiscent of his father's attempts at coalition building prior to the first Gulf War. As the war in Iraq began to drag on, with U.S. casualties mounting and costs rising rapidly, Bush met repeatedly with world leaders to seek greater international participation in the reconstruction of the country and urged the United Nations to take a bigger role than it had yet been willing to assume. Notably absent from those meetings--even meetings with his counterparts in France and Germany--was the kind of muscular and almost bullying rhetoric the president had used during the buildup to the war. In Iraq itself, the United States took a backstage role, at least publicly, letting Iraqis become the public face of both the rebuilding effort and the campaign to destroy the Iraqi rebels trying to disrupt the transition to a democratic government. If one trait marked the president's behavior during the latter months of 2004, it was a decidedly uncharacteristic restraint, far more reminiscent of his father's style than of the style he himself had displayed at the war's outset. That, rather than the foreign-policy attitude his critics had condemned as arrogance, will likely mark a second term.

On the domestic front, Bush will reclaim the unrealized goals of his first four years--and in this will succeed where his father did not. President George H.W. Bush put forth comprehensive programs for a host of domestic issues--plans to reform our education and health-care systems and programs to inspire citizens to public service. The Gulf War diverted his attention (sound familiar?) and afterwards, his advisors persuaded him to put his preferred agenda on hold until after his presumed reelection. The current President Bush came into office determined not to repeat the sad history of his father's administration, but his domestic goals, too, got lost in the consuming fires of combat. Given a second chance, President Bush will demonstrate that compassionate conservatism has substance. He will commit his administration to inventive systemic reforms that in a true "take responsibility for yourself" Republican way, address education, tax policy health care, and retirement.

President Bush's father had made education reform a prime goal of his presidency. "No Child Left Behind," this president's education initiative, was reminiscent of proposals that had been put forth by George H. W. Bush. And both plans met the same fate. With foreign policy dominating his presidency, George H.W. Bush saw his education goals fail to make it into policy. With the new war in Iraq eating up huge chunks of the federal treasury, this president's ambitious education programs have been forced to get by on far too few dollars. Reforming the country's school system would have been the centerpiece of the father's second term; it will be the centerpiece of his son's next four years.

President Bush will continue to deal with the constant threat of international terrorism, but like the Soviet threat of the 20th century, this issue will settle into its appropriate place in the policy lexicon of the Oval Office. (Presidents have lived and dealt with threat before. Franklin Roosevelt even found time to pursue an aggressive domestic agenda--thanks in part to pressure from his wife--in the midst of World War II.) Even his way of fighting the war on terror will come to resemble the approach taken by his lather. The first President Bush, a year hero himself, understood the value of military force, but he was, above all a negotiator, a coalition-builder, a man who saw national security issues as multi-dimensional, involving diplomacy, foreign assistance, and the proverbial struggle "for the hearts and minds" of potential adversaries. Paced with the need to use force in places like Kuwait and Somalia, the first President Bush focused intently not only on how to get the military in, but also on how to get it out.

This president, confronting a different kind of challenge after the attacks of September 11 and believing that Saddam Hussein posed the potential for yet another such attack, responded quickly and militarily; first in Afghanistan, then in Iraq. The result has been division in America, hostility abroad, and while the president will continue to believe he acted as he had to, he will respond to future crises much as his father did, with military force being not the only, or first, option. This second-chance president will step with more caution before he leads the country into further battles, and will devote considerable energy to reforming the intelligence and defense apparatus in Washington.

There is no way of knowing, of course, whether the president's approach toward the terrorist threat might have changed if he had retained the popularity he enjoyed in the early days after September 11 or in the aftermath of congressional authorization to go to war in Iraq. But if Bush wins reelection, it will be because many of his voters found John Kerry a lesser alternative and were willing to give President Bush and his agenda a second chance, even though many questioned his management of the war in Iraq.

Do not look for Donald Rumsfeld or John Ashcroft to dominate a second Bush presidency as they have the first. Do not look for President Bush to hurl more flowers (such as the proposed constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage) at the feet of those who proclaim themselves to be spokesmen for American conservatives. Having found the voters willing to let him try again, George W. Bush will respond with a presidency that will make him more popular when it ends than when it began.

Mickey Edwards is a lecturer at the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton University. He was a Republican member of Congress from Oklahoma from 1977-93 and is former chairman of the Republican Policy Committee and of the American Conservative Union.

Nancy Sinnott Dwight was executive director of the National Republican Congressional Committee from 1980-83 and was a guest lecturer at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University.

The Left Learns from Goldwater

By Todd Gitlin 

If George W. Bush wins a second term, it is likely that whatever factors will have moved swing voters into his column will also suffice to keep Republicans in control of both houses of Congress. Progressives, who had banded together with Democratic centrists in an unprecedented and deeply, felt display of unity, will then be faced with a choice whose importance is hard to underestimate.

They can decide that candidate Kerry lost because he did not commit frilly enough to liberal principles, and turn their backs on coalition-building. But this would be unwise. The crucial divide will be between those who understand it's the infrastructure, stupid, and those who don't.

Those in the Democratic camp and the rational liberal-left who believe in long-term institutional politics should conclude that they could not possibly have compensated for 30-plus years of right-wing base-building with one year's fever of anti-Bush resolve. They should, like the Republican Party after the Goldwater cataclysm of 1964, sigh, shudder, mourn--and organize. They'll pick themselves up and get back to work building their start-up think tanks and media and Internet networks, from the Center for American Progress through Air America Radio through MoveOn.org and various 527 soft money distributors, all of which, despite starting late, made up for a good deal of Democratic organizational weakness in 2004.

That is, if they're smart. The post-Goldwater Republicans were smart. Despite what looked like a calamity, they didn't bolt from the GOP. They didn't break off as a third party, though some of them dearly wanted to. Will the rebellious left discipline itself, cool its boiling blood, and decide that the pleasures of sectarianism are worth less than the steady resolve of infrastructural work?

The institution-builders in and around the Democratic Party will pull out all stops to urge the activists who mobilized against Bush to throw themselves back into action--continuing to mobilize against Bush's judicial nominations, which will remain blockable; into the congressional and senatorial races of 2006; into local and statewide party campaigns where political machines are built and alliances refined. I see no reason why the center and left of the Democrats should differ over the necessity of all these objectives.

Both wings will open their political eyes. A desolate January 2005 will be an occasion for generational succession. The post-Goldwater Republicans found their next hero in Goldwater's most eloquent backer, Ronald Reagan, with their moneymen building him up for a gubernatorial run in 1966. Perhaps the Democrats will find--may have already found--their Reagan in Barack Obama. If the DLC is smart, it will also look to a new generation of leaders--maybe Obama can be their man, too.

The mobilized base--from MoveOn.org and the Deaniacs on rightward--will probably split. There will, of course, be divisions on policy--Medicare, foreign policy, and so on. But more important will be the tension between those who believe in building infrastructure and those who think the party's malaise can be cured overnight by the right (i.e., left) man or woman on the right horse.

Many of the young go-for-broke voters, having failed to change the world in their first electoral outing, will be tempted to paint themselves into a gaudy Naderite corner. Nader himself will offend some of them away with some combination of gloating and what-me-responsible? shrugs--but not all. As after Humphrey's defeat of 1968, some of the far left will yield to fury, sullenness, and despair. The Greens will recruit.

Many Democrats who spent months reveling in desperate unity will crash. They will have clenched their teeth, made nice, and learned how to be center-left. Not only will they have simulated this at their convention in July, they will have become that precious thing, a party that is--as it must be--a coalition. And all for what? Another defeat.

George Bush will have stamped his foot, snapped out his talking points and barking phrases, and accomplished his mission on the basis of a record farther right than any in a generation. Realism will be dead in the Republican Party and they will have won in its absence. The Republicans' center of gravity will continue to rest on the double fantasy of supply-side economies (Dick Cheney: "Reagan showed that deficits don't matter") and war at will.

Lieberman centrists (of the DLC & Co.) and Kennedy liberals (of Americans Coming Together & Co.) will gnash their teeth, gnaw on each other, blame Kerry (for going too far left, for not going far enough left, for lacking luster, for misunderestimating Bush, you name it). Then, one morning, if they're smart, they'll all wake up and realize they've all missed a stupendous opportunity and they had better roll up their sleeves, consult their demographic oracles, and become institution-builders.

Make no mistake: None of this will be easy, and the forces for coalition will be tested. Most Democrats will likely be in a tizzy for a while after the re-election. But if they are smart enough, they will satisfy themselves initially with small, slow steps. Congressional Democrats of all ideological stripes will fight bill by bill, try to stop one judicial appointment at a time. They will not be so quick to sign a blank check for war with Iran or North Korea as they were in Iraq. And they will still lose many battles.

Many activists, novices and veterans, will despair, or wrestle with despair. They will entertain wild, secessionist fantasies, or claim they're on the verge of moving to old Europe. Morosely, they will remind themselves that Republicans have triumphed after the grandest Democratic-liberal mobilization in decades. They will lack a theory of history that injects them with confidence that, despite defeat, the wheel will eventually turn their way.

So, politics altogether will seem to be blocked. Dropouts will multiply. In this overheated atmosphere, I would not be surprised to see outbursts of political violence the likes of which we haven't seen since the Weather Underground of the 1970s. The commitment to marginality in much of the antiglobalization movement would take on a tang of negative logic. The master argument will sound like this: What else you got, you so-called practical types?

The practical types had better be practical.

Todd Gitlin, a professor of journalism and sociology at Columbia University, is author of Letters to a Young Activist and The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage.

The Deficit Conquers All

By Sebastian Mallaby

Ronald Reagan promised tax cuts in his 1980 campaign, and delivered in his first year in the White House. After that, however, Reagan turned around, raising taxes three times during his term in office. For those who now contemplate a second Bush term, the Reagan story holds out hope. Won't the budget deficit, compounded by the approach of baby boomer retirement, compel Bush to reconsider his love affair with tax cuts?

It's possible. But most of what we've seen from Bush thus far suggests it isn't likely. The president has elevated consistency above most other governing virtues: His attack on Kerry as a flip-flopper reflects his own peculiar brand of unapologetic policy rigidity. Bush shows no signs of dropping any member of the foreign policy team that led him to alienate allies, botch the postwar planning in Iraq, misconstrue intelligence on weapons of mass destruction, and permit the abuses of Abu Ghraib. Likewise, he shows no sign of rethinking his ambition to make his first-term tax cuts permanent, especially since his father paid a political price for reneging on his tax commitment.

To the contrary, indeed, the best guess is that Bush won't merely seek to make his tax cuts permanent. He will actually want new ones. His has already proposed new tax breaks for retirement savings, and he favors tax-sheltered health savings accounts. It seems inevitable that a president from either party will want to "fix" the Alternative Minimum Tax, a device that prevents high earners from claiming too many deductions. Perish the thought that the well-off should raise their kids without the help of tax deductions from the government.

If this is the likely shape of tax policy in a second term, how will history judge the Bush presidency? Some early reviews are already available: "Past administrations from the time of Alexander Hamilton have on the average run responsible budgetary policies," says the Nobel laureate George Akerlof. "What we have here is a form of looting." Is that judgment going to stand? The more you consider the country's options, the more Akerlof appears to be on target.

To see why this is so, consider the following thought experiment. Assume that a second-term Bush will stick to his tax cuts, and then ask: Is there something, anything, that can possibly be done to stop future deficits from exploding?

The Bush administration's stock answer to this question can be dispensed with quickly. Officials declare their solemn intent to restrain government spending, but their record suggests the opposite. President Bush has presided over an explosion of spending not just on defense and homeland security, but in other areas, too. He has signed into law an enormous subsidy program for farmers; he has increased foreign aid by 50 percent; he has participated in the creation of a Medicare drug entitlement. Some of these programs are deserving, to be sure. But the Bush promise to restrain spending simply isn't credible, especially since the president has never once wielded his veto pen to block Congressional pork-barreling.

The next way the Bush administration claims to be able to address the deficit is to reform Social Security. Let's be generous, now: We'll set aside the fact that Bush ignored the various reform proposals put forward by his own Social Security advisory commission, judging the topic too politically hot to handle. Let's assume that, in a second term, Bush acquires a burst of reformist courage on Social Security. What impact is that likely to have on the nation's budget outlook?

There are two answers. In the short term and even the medium term, a shift to private retirement accounts would increase the budget deficit, since the government would have to carry on paying existing retirees while forgoing the Social Security contributions of younger workers, who will have opted out of the system. In the longer term, meaning after 2048, by the administration's own calculations, real savings are possible, because the money in private retirement accounts can be invested in equities, which tend to earn decent returns over the long term. That investment income represents money to finance retirement that isn't available now. Whatever the disadvantages of private accounts--notably, that they transfer investment risk onto individuals--the Bush administration can fairly claim that privatization would improve the long-term budget outlook.

How big is this effect, though? Surprisingly small, is the answer. According to a study by Alan Auerbach of Berkeley and Peter Orszag and William Gale of the Brookings Institution, the budget deficit is likely to grow from about 4 percent of GDP at the moment to around 20 percent in 2040. But the cost of social security will expand from just 43 percent of GDP to 65 percent. In other words, only a small fraction of the nation's looming fiscal disaster is due to Social Security.

If Social-Security reform is insufficient, what else could Bush do? The president's team makes much of his determination to boost economic growth, and (as the 1990s demonstrated) growth can certainly have a big impact on the budget. To give a rough measure of growth's fiscal potential, an extra 1 percentage point on the annual growth rate would cut the projected deficit in 2014 from around 3.5 percent of GDP to a far less alarming 0.5 percent, according to the Berkeley-Brookings calculations.

Generating that extra growth--which means boosting the economy's cruising speed from just under 3 percent growth a year to just under 4 percent--is going to be a tall order. The tax cuts, by themselves, are not going to do it. Although certain kinds of tax cuts do boost incentives to work hard, save more, and take entrepreneurial risks, all of which theoretically boost growth, tax cuts also tend to lower the government's savings rate, reducing the pool of capital available for investment and nudging up interest rates. A range of econometric studies suggest that these opposing effects--stronger work incentives on the one hand, higher interest rates on the other--roughly cancel each other out. A second-term Bush administration would therefore need to broaden its agenda to get the growth that might make the tax cuts seem retrospectively defensible.

There are, in principle at least, several policies that could boost growth. Fully liberalized global trade would create a boost to GDP of 2 percent, according to Harvard's Jeff Frankel, an alumnus of Clinton's Council of Economic Advisers. But this would be a one-time boost to the size of the economy, not a shift in the growth rate, so it would be too small to close more than a small part of the deficit forecast for 2014, and would make barely any impact in the years thereafter. In any case, free made is not something that an American president can will into existence unilaterally. Even success in the current Doha round of trade talks would fall short of freeing trade completely.

Tort reform is another growth-promoting option. America's outrageous system, which transfers more than $100 billion into lawyers' pockets annually, slows growth in two ways: The expense of dealing with litigation consumes corporate funds that might otherwise go to innovation and research; and the fear of litigation causes companies to withhold products from the market, order safety tests that generate little useful information, and generally to dissipate their: energies in defensive strategies that are more about reducing legal exposure than about genuine safety improvements. But how much extra growth might you get from tort reform, setting aside the problem that it would be unlikely to get through Congress? Robert Litan of Brookings Institution puts the answer at just 0.1 percent of GDP per year.

A similar verdict holds for regulatory reform, another policy that the administration has pushed quietly. Regulatory reform need not be an assault on air quality or safety or anything else of value; it can consist of weeding out expensive regulations that buy little benefit in terms of health and safety, and replacing these with others that are less burdensome and more effective. A smart benefit-cost review of the regulatory state could reduce the drag on businesses without harming citizens. But though this yields some effect on the growth rate, it isn't dramatic.

What of boosting government investment in education and research spending? More education is certainly a good idea. As the journalist Daniel Altman writes in Neoconomy, his book on the Bush economics philosophy, the verdict of the economics profession is that an extra year in a four-year college can raise a worker's future wages by 5 to 10 percent, more than paying for the cost of the tuition. But the fiscal pay-off from this strategy is limited, because the government will only capture a third of the worker's extra earnings in taxes. Equally, government-funded research can generate growth-enhancing breakthroughs from biotechnology to the Interact, and more might be a good idea. But the link between extra spending and extra breakthroughs is unpredictable. It seems unwise to bet the nation's fiscal future on it.

The bottom line is that higher growth is possible, and would have a real fiscal pay-off; but government has no certain way of boosting the growth rate enough to make its tax cuts look retrospectively defensible. As information technology revolutionized American business during the 1990s, economists did revise their view of the economy's potential growth substantially upward: Whereas productivity increased at 1.5 percent a year in the first half of the 1990s, it increased at 2.5 percent in the second half. But the Internet revolution probably won't be matched any time soon, and policies such as tort reform or regulatory reform come nowhere close to it. Moreover, it would take a further jump of more than 1 percent to fix the vast deficits that loom in 2040 and onward.

If neither Social-Security reform nor pro-growth government policy am likely to rescue the Bush budget policy, what is there left? The answer is health care. Between now and 2040, on the Berkeley-Brookings projections, federal spending on Medicare and Medicaid will grow by over 6 percent of GDP, nearly three times the size of jump as Social Security faces.

A large chunk of this projected health care spending reflects inefficiencies in the U.S. system. The nation spends 15 percent of GDP on health, 6 percentage points more than the average rich economy; and yet Americans do not live any longer. Within this country, some states manage to spend twice as much per Medicare patient as other states spend--again, without any improvement in health outcomes. Elliott Fisher of Dartmouth University reckons that, if the efficiency of the best-run fifth of the nation could be matched by every region, Medicare spending would drop by 30 percent. Similar savings might be achievable in the private health system, which would help the government's finances as well. Medical insurance is provided by companies to employees on a tax-free basis, so efficiencies that squeeze money out of health into other parts of the economy increase the tax take.

Health care clearly offers bigger deficit-closing opportunities than Social-Security reform or pro-growth policies. But are these opportunities enough to rescue Bush's fiscal legacy? If the Medicare spending projected in 2040 were cut by 30 percent, the savings would come to just over 2 percent of GDP; the tax flow-through from new private-sector health efficiency might bring that up to a total of 3 percent. But that is the equivalent of just under a fifth of the total deficit projected in 2040, and it assumes that the political system showed more grit in tackling the medical-industrial complex than it has hitherto exhibited. Moreover; squeezing inefficiencies out of health care would likely not prevent the tendency of health costs to rise faster than GDP. The steep rise in health care spending is driven overwhelmingly by new technologies. We are not going to stop wanting the benefits of new kinds of care, so health spending will carry on rising rapidly.

In short, the thought experiment points to some pretty stark conclusions. Even if you assume improbable amounts of political courage in a second Bush term, the chances that the administration could come up with something dramatic enough to forestall fiscal disaster are between modest and zero.

The basic premise of the tax cuts--that the size of government can and should be contained--is ahistorical and wrong. Ahistorical, because government's share of GDP has in fact grown steadily as societies have grown richer over the past century. Wrong, because government in the age of the baby bust is going inevitably to grow. Bush has failed to understand where history is headed, and history will judge him harshly for it.

Sebastian Mallaby is a member of The Washington Post editorial board and author of forthcoming The World's Banker A Story of Failed States, Financial Crises, and the Wealth and Poverty of Nations.

W.Takes on Global Warming

By Gregg Easterbrook

Second-term presidents traditionally turn their thoughts to history. Of the two most recently reelected presidents, Ronald Reagan in his second term became interested in nuclear-arms reduction treaties with the Soviet Union, in part because they could make him a historic president; Bill Clinton's thoughts of history were postponed by the Monica mess but, by his final year in office, he was trying desperately to solve the Israeli-Palestinian dispute. If George W. Bush is reelected, how future historians remember him may become a White House concern. There remains a chance that history will come to regard the invasion of Iraq as a liberation and a progressive turning point in Arab society, but the odds are greater the invasion will be pronounced a colossal folly. A reelected Bush, if he wants to win favor with historians, will have to do something impressive, statesmanlike, and out of character.

Which is why I think a second-term Bush will be the president who imposes global-warming controls.

The scientific case for concern over an artificial greenhouse effect becomes stronger every year. To cite one of many indicators, a few months ago Thomas Karl, director of the federal National Climatic Data Center and once a leading greenhouse skeptic, declared that "anthropogenic climate change is now likely," with impacts "quite disruptive" to agriculture and global economics. Of all nations, only Denmark, Ireland, the Netherlands, Sweden, and Slovenia have meaningful greenhouse-gas reduction standards, and even if these prove successful, the aggregate mass of the nations imposing them is not sufficient to have more than a negligible impact on the overall problem. The United States is both the number-one source of artificially generated greenhouse gases, and the number-one source of economic and technological change--meaning we are both most responsible for the problem, and the most likely to solve it. The sooner the United States puts its shoulder against the global warming threat, the better for the world.

Now consider where George W. Bush will stand in a second term. As a Republican, he is expected to be opposed to environmental regulations. (Actually the EPA was founded under Richard Nixon, the Clean Air Act was made much stronger under George H. W. Bush in 1990, and George W. Bush has strengthened rules to reduce smog, but that's another issue.) Bush's natural constituency is the petroleum industry, so he would be expected not to regulate his oil pals. (Petroleum products are the second-leading cause of artificial greenhouse gases, coal the first) Whichever U.S. president imposes the initial round of greenhouse reforms will be admired by historians. If a Republican oil-industry president is the first to do this, playing- against type, historians may be deeply impressed.

There's your opening, second-term George W. Bush. Be the man who is not afraid to face the threat of global warming.

Gregg Easterbrook is a contributing editor of The Washington Monthly and The Atlantic Monthly, a senior editor of The New Republic, a visiting fellow of the Brookings Institution, and author, most recently, of The Progress Paradox.

The Roquefort Cheese Wars

By Christopher Buckley

Why does the question "What if he wins?" sound, in this context, so ominous, as if it were the title of a big-screen disaster movie? Portent of tsunami and a frozen-over Manhattan?

W2 is not a terribly encouraging prospect. I say this as a loyal but dispirited Republican who will probably hold his nose on election day and pull the Republican lever. Every time I contemplate voting for Kerry--and I have--I consider the consequences, chiefly among them an even more insufferable Michael Moore, thumping his kettle drum chest and claiming credit for having changed the course of history. This is too dreary to contemplate.

But to answer the question, let me paraphrase Betty Davis: Fasten your seat belts, kids, we're in for a bumpy second term.

The present political atmosphere is so partisan, mutually suspicious, and antagonistic who, really, would be surprised to wake up the day after the election to the news that recounts were being demanded in all 50 states, by both sides? Or even in Guam, where, as we relearn every four years, America's day begins?

This will not be a pretty spectacle, or healthy for the republic. The last election took 35 days to settle. This time, it could conceivably take longer. Maybe it would make sense to move Inauguration Day back to its previous March 4 slot.

But let's say Bush does squeak through with a little luck--paging James Baker--and a Sandra Day O'Connor deus ex machina. What, as Robert Redford said at the end of The Candidate, do we do now?

Second terms are not notorious for being successful. Eisenhower, LBJ (if you Consider '64-'68 a second term), Nixon, Reagan, Clinton--would any of them consider their second helping a triumph? And their approval ratings, going in, were generally higher than Bush's. It's hard to find many, even in the most vermilion parts of the red states, who are deep down, in their heart of hearts, ardent for George W. Bush. Among the rock-ribbed, one does not hear enthusiastic cries of "Encore! Encore!" (We of the Republican persuasion tend to lapse into French at times of excitement--a legacy, sans doute, of attending fancy boarding schools.)

Assuming Bush stays the course--as we used to say during Reagan's first term--then from the point of view of a traditional (that is, pre-compassionate) conservatism, the prospects seem pretty bleak: quagmire in Iraq; a series of petty made wars with old Europe involving Roquefort cheese; feckless attempts to placate congressmen by levying and then rescinding tariffs; bigger government (while decrying the growth thereof); a military stretched wafer-thin; toleration of failure at the CIA and FBI, while paying lip service to the recommendations of the 9/11 Commission; the further decline of American prestige abroad; and most ominously of all, a plunge in visa applications by native French speakers. Who, then, will teach America's future leaders the language at the fancy boarding schools? This is a crisis that cannot be ignored much longer.

Bush is a conspicuous Christian, but he is not on the whole given to conspicuous displays of one of the chief Christian virtues: humility. It would become him, should the Almighty bestow on him the grace of another term in office, to manifest some. Nothing so extreme as showing up at cabinet meetings wearing an itchy hair shirt, or even bowing and scraping before the (old) Europeans--something Kerry seems impatient to start doing--but a little frank chin-wag with the nation from the Oval Office about how he realizes that things did not turn out in Iraq as well as he had hoped; that the "mission" is not yet "accomplished," that four-hundred-billion-dollar deficits are not desirable; and that if the Congress sends him one more squealing, oinking pork-laden, budget-busting bill, he is going to veto it. He might, too, in the same talk even extend a hand to old Europe, saying that while America cannot ask permission of its friends to defend itself when it is truly threatened, but that it also understands that as what's-his-name, the poet guy, put it: No country is an island.

Another Republican president, in his second inaugural, talked of binding up the nation's wounds. Not a bad text. Not a bad way to reboot.

Christopher Buckley, founding editor of Forbes FYI, is the author of, most recently, Florence of Arabia, a Middle East comedy (Random House, September 2004).

Decline of American Greatness

By Elaine Kamarck

At the root of all power is wealth. With sufficient wealth a country can afford a strong military while still making the domestic investments (in roads, schools, medical care, scientific research, etc.) that keep citizens productive and the economic pie expanding. High taxes choke off growth, but so do high deficits. Living off your credit cards is as bad for your country as it is for your family. In the long run, there is simply no way around it--bad fiscal policy is bad economic policy, and a threat to a nation's power.

Most American presidents have understood this. Ronald Reagan raised taxes to quell the mounting deficits caused by his previous tax cuts and defense increases. Further budget discipline by Reagan's successors, George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton, left America at the end of the 20th century with a booming economy, unrivaled military and diplomatic power, and revenue surpluses.

Then along came George W. Bush.

In one term, he has wiped away one of the Republican Party's most appealing characteristics--its concern for fiscal discipline. Bush and his advisers firmly believed that taxes should go only and always in one direction: down. And they were determined to exploit America's military dominance more fully. Neither the recession of 2001-2003, which drained away much of the surplus, nor the 9/11 attacks altered this view. Instead of focusing our military and diplomatic resources on al Qaeda and Afghanistan, the president chose to invade Iraq without broad international support and against the advice of much of the national-security establishment. Instead of reversing the tax cuts or even raising taxes, as all previous presidents had done in wartime (and most patriotic Americans would probably have supported), Bush continued to cut them. And instead of imposing spending discipline, the president allowed the GOP-controlled Congress to abandon the "pay-as-you-go" budget principles revived by his father and failed to veto even the most pork-ridden spending measures.

These reckless fiscal and military policies are destined to undercut America's wealth and power for years to come, regardless of who wins in November. But if Bush garners a second term, we could be in for something far worse: the beginning of the end of American greatness.

No amount of dire warnings or severe criticisms dissuaded the president from pursuing reckless fiscal and military policies in his first term. Therefore he is unlikely to suddenly change his mind if the plurality of voters validate those policies by supporting him in November. He will no doubt interpret a second term as a mandate to make their tax cuts permanent and, in all probability, to reduce to zero taxes on capital gains.

How, then, will he respond when the deficits skyrocket even more? In three ways, none of which inspire confidence.

First, he will try to reintroduce the "reform" agenda he began in his first term but largely put aside. This agenda, as more than one Democrat has pointed out, is really about unraveling social insurance. From privatization of Social Security to tort reform to Health Savings Accounts to a variety of innocent sounding changes to small business--what holds the Bush reform agenda together is a desire to undo the social safety net. These changes would further undercut the middle class and put our future at risk as health and education outcomes deteriorated for more and more people.

In a second Bush term, however, Democrats will not be as shell-shocked as they were in the first two years of the first George W. Bush administration, and they will block most of Bush's reform agenda. Professor William A. Galston, a veteran of the Clinton White House and many Democratic campaigns says, "I can't imagine that Democrats will do business with Republicans after WMD, No Child Left Behind, prescription drugs, etc." A second-term Bush administration, then, would probably be no more able to enact radical changes to social programs than the first one was.

The next option to control spiraling deficits would be to enact large budge cuts across the board. This would wipe out many discretionary spending programs and push all sorts of costs--Medicaid, juvenile delinquency, mental illness, and education for starters--down to the local level. Property taxes would either rise way too quickly creating a middle class revolt--or governors and mayors would hold the line and radically cut services for the most disadvantaged. The political fallout from these severe cuts in social spending would be enormous--which is why no Republican, from Newt Gingrich to George Bush, has ever been able to make big cuts in the programs they claim to dislike so much. Thus, it is highly unlikely that a second-term George Bush could create cuts in spending sufficient to do something significant about the deficit.

That leaves option number three: Carry on the tradition of the first term and simply assert that massive spending cuts are not needed because tax cuts will be sufficient to grow our way out of the deficits. But robust economic growth eluded the Bush team for most of his first term. Job creation has been slow and the recovery halting--giving rise to great cynicism about George Bush's campaign claim to have "turned the corner."

In a second term, growth will be even more elusive because it will be affected by something the American presidency has no control over: the accelerating growth of the gargantuan Chinese economy driving up global demand for oil. The rate of growth in global demand for which will have doubled by the end of 2005 in just one decade compared to the rate of growth in the 22-year period before it. Demand-driven increasing energy costs will not go away. Expensive energy makes everything we make and buy and drive expensive, too. And yet the Bush administration can't see beyond oil. I don't buy into the conspiracy theories of the left, that Bush and company are out for the oil money. But it is clear to me that the mindset of oil men is totally inadequate to leading us out of an oil-dependent economy. If Bush is reelected, the failure to wean us from dependence on foreign oil will rank high in the reasons why the Bush administration presided over the beginning of the end of America's wealth.

In short, there are no signs that George Bush in a second term would be able to correct the fiscal mess he created in the first term. Moreover, the Bush deficits will run up against another looming financial crisis. Sometime in the decade after a second Bush term, the Social Security Trust Fund will begin to pay out more than it takes in. Everyone knows this is coming. Another Clinton era veteran, Rob Shapiro, predicts that by the end of the second term the market's horizon will begin to take in the Social Security and Medicare crisis. With huge additional spending burdens in the context of a huge deficit, the capital markets will presume that Washington policymakers will take one of two economically detrimental paths: inflate their way out of the bind or raise taxes. One Wall Street Democrat predicts a 25-basis-point increase in interest rates every three months well into the future.

By the end of a second Bush term, our nation will be poorer, and poor nations have trouble leading the world. So do nations that no one believes. Preemption is not necessarily a flawed strategy; it is only flawed if the judgment about the immediacy of the threat is wrong. The public, the press, and the Democratic Party--all of whom gave the president the benefit of the doubt on Iraq--will be hyper critical and suspicious of further claims that some nation is about to do us harm. The failure to find WMD and the suspicions aroused by recent announcements of "new" terror threats that turn out to be three years old are beginning to have a boy-who-cried-wolf effect. Who will believe President Bush when he tries to mobilize the country to go to war against an aggressive and nuclear Iran? Or an out of control Kim Jong Il?

Once devalued, trust is hard to regain. Even a President John Kerry will face suspicion if he finds that he has to take the country to war. But no one will face suspicion the way a second-term President Bush will and that could lead us into a situation where we don't fight when we should.

America started the 21st century with great wealth, great power, and great moral authority in the world. But in the blink of an eye, Bush took us from budget surpluses to budget deficits, from a military, that was feared to a military that is exhausted and stretched to the breaking point, and from a country that could lead the world to a country that invokes suspicion at home and abroad. We are at the beginning of what may be a long war on terror. This means that we need all aspects of our power--our military power, our economic power, and our moral power--in tact. Bush has squandered all of them in his first term. We can't afford a second term.

Elaine Kamarck is a Lecturer in Public Policy at the Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University. She served in the Clinton White House from 1993 to 1997, where she created and managed the administration's National Performance Review, also known as reinventing government.

America Gets Privatized

By E.J. Dionne

What would President Bush do with a second term? Let's take him at his word. Bush is engaged in a bold (and, if you disagree with him, dangerous) project to dismantle the social advances of the New and Fair Deals, the New Frontier, and the Great Society. He wants to throw more risk onto the individual, free corporations and employers from regulations that protect employees and consumers, and reduce government's role in providing retirement security. He would further cut taxes on the savings and investments of the well-off and weaken the individual's right to sue corporations and heath-care providers for malfeasance.

Or, to put this same list in Bush's terms, he wants to "empower" individuals, end "junk law suits," expand "incentives" for investment, give the elderly "ownership of their retirement," and free businesses from "unnecessary" regulation. A second Bush term would be a big deal, if not necessarily a fair one. I write these words before the president has spoken to his national convention, where his aides promise he lay out his new ambitions. But he's already told us a lot about where he wants to go.

He proposed partially privatizing Social Security in the 2000 election campaign, and has stuck to his position. He'd take a couple of percentage points off payroll taxes that now go the Social Security fund and allow individuals to invest the amount in private accounts. The transition costs of the plan--because Bush has also promised to allow those at or near retirement to stay in the current system--would amount to about $1 trillion. Retirement costs would have to be covered, even as revenues were cut by the privatization scheme. It's not clear where Bush would find the money; though he could just add to the deficit.

On Medicare, Bush would like to replace the current system that guarantees all seniors the medical treatment they need with fixed payments to subsidize the purchase of private insurance. He has not quite said this explicitly, but this is the direction in which his rhetoric (and his conservative allies) have pointed. For the wealthy; this program would be fine; they could supplement government subsidies with their own funds. The non-wealthy would be stuck with a guaranteed minimum. This would be sold as "choice." But under the current system, seniors actually can choose their doctors and treatments. The only "choice" guaranteed by partial privatization of Medicare would be among health-insurance companies or HMOs. Which is the "choice" that health-care consumers really want?

The cuts in taxes on savings and investment Bush is likely to seek would mark yet another step in transferring taxation from wealth to work--from investors to wage earners. An ever larger share of government revenue would come from payroll and income taxes. Bush sees this as encouraging investment.

The president is also talking about "flextime." It sounds good. Individuals could cash in overtime pay for time off. But this is also a way to weaken laws guaranteeing that those who work more than 40 hours a week get paid time and a half for their extra hours. That's why employers love the flextime idea. Yes, there may be useful ways to encourage more flexibility in the time/money tradeoff. But can one count on an administration that dislikes regulation of business to guarantee that workers would not be pressured to give up the overtime pay they are now entitled to?

Bush will present these ideas under the appealing slogan of an "ownership society." An ownership society is a great idea. It's the very thing that unions sought: Pushing up wages allowed individuals to own their own homes and send their kids to college. The GI Bill, student loans, Pell Grants, Head Start, minimum wages--all were and are designed to help individuals gain the skills, income, and power to become self-sufficient owners. Reducing government help and protection for wage earners and senior citizens is likely to retard the goal of an "ownership society."

Would the planks of this Bush program be passed? As long as Democrats hold at least 45 seats in the Senate--they are likely to win at least several more than that, perhaps even a majority--much of dais Bush agenda will be stillborn. But you never know. Enough Democrats caved in to Bush on his tax-cut proposals to make them law. Maybe the privatized world Bush seeks could happen if Democrats are intimidated by his reelection. That makes the outcome of November's presidential vote very important.

E. J. Dionne is the author of Stand Up, Fight Back: Republican Toughs, Democratic Wimps and the Pofitics of Revenge (Simon & Schuster, 2004), a Washington Post Writers Group columnist, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and a professor at Georgetown University.

The Glorious Revolution: A Look Back

By Jeff Greenfield

As imagined spontaneously and simultaneously by Michael Moore, Whoopi Goldberg, Paul Krugman, and a majority of residents of Manhattan's Upper West Side.

July 2008. Looking back on the progress we've made these last few years, it is hard to remember that it all began in the depths of despair.

Four years ago, it seemed clear that even the most desperate of measures by Karl Rove and company would not save President Bush from defeat. Though the astonishing events of the third debate--Vice President Dick Cheney emerging from the wings dragging a humbled and repentant Osama bin Laden by the scruff of his neck--had given the Bush campaign a badly-needed boost, things had taken a turn for the worse following news of Halliburton's no-bid contract to drill for oil in the soon-to-be-privatized National Parks. Kerry was well on his way to amassing a three-million-vote edge in the popular contest when the networks announced razor-thin Bush victories in Florida and Ohio, giving the incumbent a two-vote margin in the electoral college. Though Democrats demanded a recount in the latter following Bush's remarkable 93 percent showing among Cincinnati's Diebold-equipped polling precincts, they were stymied by yet another 5-4 vote in the Supreme Court, featuring Justice Scalia's novel "original intent" interpretation of the Constitution's equal protection clause. ("Surely the Founding Fathers would have thought it unthinkable that a candidate such as Sen. Kerry could hold the presidency; and since the Constitution is an admirable example of rational thought, it thus follows that what is unthinkable must be unconstitutional. It is thus unconstitutional for Sen. Kerry to assume the White House. Justice Clarence Thomas, in his concurring opinion, opined "What he said.")

In the wake of this disaster, however, lay the seeds of the glorious events that were to follow. First came what we now call The Great Trek North. For years, such prominent liberals as Alec Baldwin had warned that, should Bush be reelected, they would leave the country. Past promises regarding" Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, and George H.W. Bush had, of course, gone unfulfilled--but this time, it turned out, they meant it. In the weeks after Bush's reelection, a trickle of prominent Americans relocated to Canada; as the creative community experience firsthand Canada's more liberal social welfare polities and how much farther American currency went up north than it did at home--the trickle became a mighty flood. From P. Diddy to Willie Nelson, from Ben Affleck to Rob Reiner, from Chris Rock to Larry David, from Steven Spielberg to Admix Sorkin, from pundits to new economy titans, from academics to artists, the greatest thinkers and creators of our age took up residence in Toronto, Montreal, Ottawa, and Vancouver.

An intemperate response by the new attorney general, former Alabama judge Roy Moore, only made things worse: By closing the border to all imports from "the new deserters"--including all movies, TV shows, records, and books--the Bush administration deprived Americans of their favorite diversions, and left the entire entertainment industry in the hands of Bush supporters. The Joan Rivers-hosted "Daily Show" flopped, as did the "Spiderman" sequels produced and directed by Roger Ailes. (It turned out Al Franken didn't make a very good super-villain, especially in those tights) The last straw appears to have been Moore's appointment of Sean Hannity as the first Government Authorized Standup Comedian. ("Why did the chicken cross the road? Because that's where the rest of the antiwar wimps were!") It wasn't long before even Jeff Foxworthy was endorsing Democrats for office.

Sports, too, fell under the heavy hand of the Bush administration. With every baseball game now required to include "God Bless America" every half inning, the time of the average game stretched to more than four hours, and attendance plummeted. When the new Secretary of Traditional Values, John Ashcroft, banned all tattoos and piercings, the NFL and NBA were crippled by strikes and rulebook slowdowns.

The result? Sweeping Democratic gains in the 2006 midterms that put both houses of Congress firmly in the hands of the opposition party. Impeachment proceedings against both Bush and Cheney were launched soon after, and by 2007, Speaker Nancy Pelosi had taken over as president. The prompt repatriation of America's cultural elite instantly put the federal budget into surplus, all but assuring that the Democratic ticket would sweep to victory. Of course, as I write this, the Democratic convention is now entering its 106th ballot, with President Pelosi, Vice President Obama, Sen. Clinton, and former senator John Edwards struggling for supremacy. But whoever wins, a brighter day looms. Or, as Sen. Kerry put it, "Le jour de gloire est arrive!"

Jeff Greenfield is a CNN senior analyst His books include The People's Choice and Oh Waiter! One Order of Crow! Inside the Strangest Presidential Election Finish in American History.