Reply #56: Seems about right. [View All]

[smoogatz]

McCain's now caught in a trap of his own making--the whole "double-down" idea belongs to him, and his worst political nightmare is that Bush will actually adopt it. 20,000 more troops won't do squat; even with 200,000 additional troops it's unlikely that the U.S. could stave off civil war in Iraq. Giuliani will NEVER get the nom, IMO--he's nowhere near ideologically pure enough for the fundies. So it's either McCain or somebody like Brownback, and, unless the Dem nomination goes seriously off the rails, you're right--we win in '08, pretty much no matter what.

Your points about Kerry are spot-on, too, though of course ProSense and others will accuse you of being a tool of the RW just for having uttered them. Like it or not, fair or not, true or not, the narrative on Kerry has been written, and it's not all that flattering. Maybe he can revise it, a la Gore, but it would be a Herculean task, and to date neither he nor his followers have come to grips, I don't think, with the depths of the voting public's general disinterest in Kerry as a second-time-around candidate.

I think you're right about Gore, too. Gore runs, Gore wins--whoever the hell his running mate is (almost). Clark would be fine, Obama would be fine, Edwards would be okay, even Biden would be okay. Hillary would get everybody's hackles up, I think.