William Safire's column in today's Times made me shudder:
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/12/opinion/12SAFI.html
Both power centers of the Democratic establishment -- the Kennedy left and the Clinton middle -- are frantic at the prospect of losing control of their party to Howard Dean. They fear a McGovernesque debacle that would hand the G.O.P. a super-majority in the Senate.
Clintonites were first to take the Dean threat seriously. As reported gleefully in this space (full disclosure: I'm rooting for Dean's candidacy in hopes of the debacle), the Clinton crowd surrounded ex-Gen. Wesley Clark with Clinton managers, spinmeisters, pollsters and fund-raisers and marched him into battle against Dean.
The Clinton political strategy was, as usual, astute: let Dick Gephardt slow Dean down in Iowa, then push Clark hard enough to upset Dean in New Hampshire, or at least attract enough of the isolationist vote from Dean to let John Kerry squeak through.
[snip]
Dean has an unexpected development going for him: because his basic pitch has been to deride Iraq's liberation, he is the one Democrat not ensnared in the now-embarrassing denunciation of Bush economic policy.
[snip]
What if the war on terror begins to succeed by next summer, casualties decline, Saddam is found or Osama is killed? In that case, Bush would campaign on both growing prosperity and impending victory.
In that case, the Clinton-Kennedy establishment would be better off maintaining control and losing respectably with Kerry, Clark or even Gephardt than getting buried in a landslide with Dean. And in 2008, as Jeb Bush and Condi Rice fight out their G.O.P. primaries, Hillary will be tanned, rested and ready.
I'm less and less optimistic about the chances of beating Bush, with the way he has mortgaged the future to get a short-term economic "head rush" that will probably be enough to carry him through to victory. But a supermajority in the Senate would be worse than all the GOP gains thus far. That is, IMO the difference between 60 Republicans in the Senate and 59 (assuming the 41 Democrats are solid and won't defect, a safe assumption when you get down to that number I think), with a GOP House and president, is greater than the difference between that situation and Democratic control of the presidency, Senate (non-supermajority), and House.
The prospect of a Hillary candidacy in '08 is, as I've said before, a horrifying one as well. Judis and Texeira, in their book The Emerging Democratic Majority, which I read when I'm feeling particularly bummed about all this, are careful to note that their predictions only indicate potential for such a majority: the Democrats have to follow through with good candidates and good campaigns. With the prospect of Dean and Hillary, they are preparing to flout this requirement. And Judis has said explicitly, btw, that he believes Dean is a bad candidate, another potential McGovern. I don't know what he thinks about Hillary, but I'd be surprised if he thought she would be a good nominee.