Not to ca(r)vil(le), but it's still the economy... In spite of the sunny numbers, people (voters) know what the situation is their own bailiwick. The consumption-driven bump is over, now that re-financing, tax-cuts, and war-spending have worked through, and drawing down the dollar is self-limiting and contradictory. Increasingly frantic attempts to juice the economy will produce fewer results this summer. Bush is going to be the first president since Herbert Hoover to end his term with fewer jobs in the economy than when he began. And distress over (the lack of) health-care has been surprisingly strong in the primary polling.
In desperation, Rove et al. will turn to what (barely) won for them in 2002: terrorism. It's a perduring feature of US politics that the way to get sacrifice and discipline out of the general public is to "scare hell out of the American people," as Senator Vandenberg advised Truman more than 50 years ago. So people put up with the hated Bush domestic agenda for reasons of "national security" and elected a Republican Congress in 2002. What will the administration do for a (perhaps early) October Surprise? Bomb Iranian and/or N. Korean nukes? Send the 82nd Airborne to Venezuela to fight "terrorism on our doorstep"? (See this morning's WSJ on Chavez-Castro.) But in spite of the 911 factor, the Bush people may have gone to the well too often by November.
Polls this winter showed the red states redder and the blue states bluer than in 2000. So there are a good number of states that can be written off as irretrievably won or lost by each side. The election will be decided in the handful of states where the difference between Bush and Gore was less than 5% -- and more Bush electoral votes came from that handful than Gore votes. And there the economy will make the difference.
--CGE
[Concluding unscientific postscript: Ohio is one of that handful where a Democrat victory will win the election. To secure Ohio as well as the Deanish anti-war constituency (and to cover his back after his tergiversations on that issue), perhaps Kerry should choose Kucinich as his running-mate...]
On Sun, 1 Feb 2004 lbo at hvgreens.org wrote:
> Ok, fellow LBO'ers, I've been wanting to put the question to this
> list: What are the chances Bush will be re-elected in '04...