Jay: Could be. And don’t count on seeing prognostications like yours in the mainstream media. I think we’re going to hear a drumbeat of “it’s going to be close again” — right up to the moment when Bush wins decisively and the media mavens start talking about his “surprise, come from behind” victory.

(And not just because Robertson said he would win in a blowout, making the idea sound actually nutty…)

Besides being a total bore, he boasts about not taking islamofascist terror seriously.

And he is too much of an insider gato gordo, to please the Dean and Nader constituencies.

Pedro, get that vote out, baby!

Andrew is right that Republican loathing of Clinton was a tremendously valuable weapon in Clinton’s hands. Ordinary voters were turned off by it. The same will hold true of the intense hatred Democrats have for Bush. It will hurt them with ordinary voters.

Also, Kerry is trying to use the same populist/left sloganeering which Gore used, rejecting the centrist Clinton approach, which cost Gore the election. Kerry seems to have learned nothing from that.

And Bush hasn’t even started campaigning yet, or spending any money yet.

Pedro: Fun is not what comes to mind when I think about Nader, but have a nice time.

Andrew X: Some of us still loathe Clinton.

Sylvain et al: The Democrats badly want to win, as the Republicans did in 2000. We had to make do then with Bush, who at the time appeared to be the best of a marginal bunch of candidates. For this reason I think the Democrats are likely to rally behind whomever they nominate. Yeah, they could act like lemmings, but I don’t think that’s the way to bet.

I can only hope … .

And that is that, in the 90′s, I was a Republican who refused to loathe Bill Clinton, whom I disagreed with but would not loathe. And I was always amazed by the number of Republicans that would not only be driven completely around the bend Clinton, but how he and his supporters would literally laugh at how Clinton would make them so nuts, they’d blow their own feet off, and he would gallop to victory, again and again.

Hellllloooooooooooo.

How is possible that these same ostensibly intelligent people can immediately turn around and find themselves on the diametric opposite side of the exact same phenomena? How can they be so utterly oblivious of a dynamic that they used to mop the floor with their adversaries now crushing the air out of they themselves?

So I still need a bit of convincing on the “people learning from their mistakes” bit. Don’t even get me started on the mistakes of the human race in dealing with tyranny over the past century, something tens of millions seem inclined to forget with joyous abandon.

On the other hand, my Democrat wife surprised me when she said she’d vote for Nader. She wishes she had before, rather than Gore, and she is not impressed by Kerry. Not a scientific sample, and she knows Illinois is probably in the bag for the Democrat candidate. But the Dean crowd are very angry and potentially not willing to make tactical compromises, and many are too young to have voted in 2000. That was a long time ago, dude … .