Hoping To Be Wrong...

Back in November I wrote an article for HNN arguing that, over the last two decades, ideological unity was essential for a presidential ticket to succeed. At the time I concluded that:

The incumbent Bush-Cheney ticket, one of the tightest pairings in recent presidential politics, can and will trounce any Democratic challenge that attempts to unify the party and appeal to the electorate through political diversity rather than ideological focus. It will be particularly obvious if the vice-presidential candidate comes from the pool of failed presidential candidates, because the primary campaign sniping will be replayed immediately in the press and by the other side. To overcome the Bush/Cheney advantages of unity and money will require near-perfect candidates running a better-than-perfect campaign and some luck to boot.

Obviously, I'm a little disappointed that the VP candidate came from the primary pool, and the press and Bush campaign have indeed been recapping some of what Kerry said about Edwards (and vice versa) in the primary campaigns. I need to do some more research on their respective positions, but they are both moderate liberal democrats with strong ties to core Democratic consituencies: The NYTimes says that"They have voted alike on every major issue likely to arise during the presidential campaign, starting with the Iraq war". They are going to be pretty competitive.

Money, going by the euphemism" campaign finances," is the elephant in the living room of all political analysis. The candidate with the most money (usually the incumbent, whose fundraising begins as soon as the election ends) wins elections in the US so often that it's almost not worth talking about anything else, though like the mystics who reject the utility of language to describe the true nature of reality, we can't seem to stop. Since 1984 (some sources say 1976) the candidate with the most money one year before the general election has won their party primary; money isn't the sole factor in presidential elections, but gross disparities usually show up in the final results.

The Kerry-Edwards campaign seems to be holding its own, in funding terms, thanks in large part to the strength of internet-based fundraising pioneered by Dean and MoveOn.org. But the spending limits for the general election campaign don't take into account the difference in time between convention and election, about a 2:1 difference this year. So money could indeed bury all the other issues.

What will determine the outcome of the 2004 election? Vietnam War historian Fredrik Logevall once wrote on the H-Asia list,"It's not enough merely to list x number of causes. It is the task of the historian to reduce a given list of causes to order by establishing a causal hierarchy, and to relate the items in this hierarchy to one another." [Note: see our discussion of causality in comments here] As important as ticket unity is in recent history, the history of the 1960s and 1970s demonstrates that ticket unity can be overwhelmed by other issues. Confidence in the economy is a powerful influence on moderates and swing voters, but it will only matter if it moves out of its ambiguous"jobless recovery" into either collapse or sustained job growth. The situation in Iraq could become more polarizing or more positive, and another terrorist attack on the US is a true wild card, impossible to quantify or even guess at this point. It is worth noting however, that foreign policy will play a larger role in this election than in any other since 1980. There could always be a devastating scandal, either within the Bush administration or regarding a poorly screened Democratic challenger. [I also alluded to rumors of Cheney's replacement on the ticket, but I thought those had died down: Instapundit suggests otherwise]

Obviously, the Bush administration has been doing everything it can to make Iraq less of an issue in the short-term, but they have done a pretty poor job of it. They are trying to make the economy sound healthy, but there aren't a lot of middle-class/lower-class voters who are buying that argument right now. Unless either of those get a lot worse, though, money and ticket unity still have the upper hand, and it seems to me that the Bush/Cheney ticket has an advantage in both categories.

I hope that I'm wrong: I'd love to see Kerry/Edwards beat Bush/Cheney without having to outspend them or on the backs of some economic or military or terroristic tragedy. I'd like to see voters making decisions based on long-term issues and policy and future needs rather than their current financial status (which the president has very little control over anyway) or in a panicked reaction to some immediate crisis. Most of all, I'd like to see an election won fairly and clearly, so that I can stop worry about the future of American democracy. [However, this {via Big Tent} might be going too far]