A GOOD SIGN

You may have noticed a conservative meme floating around which could eventually develop into a full-blown rationalization of Bush's defeat. It goes something like this: "He fought the war against terrorism so well and so successfully, we can now go back to normal life. Thank you, George W. Bush, thank you. You're our Churchill." (Hack, gag)

Andrew Sullivan:

The paradox of the war against terrorism is that the more the president succeeds, the more politically vulnerable he gets. The fewer the terrorist incidents, the more remote the fear, the less necessary the war seems and the more dispensable the war-president appears. If the president responds to this by insisting that the enemy is still powerful and dangerous, he runs the risk of seeming to concede he hasn't managed to curtail the threat. Or, worse perhaps, he seems as if he's whipping up fear and panic for his own electoral advantage. And after the failures of intelligence with respect to weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, his credibility on unknown threats is already eroded. After a while, if no new terrorist incidents occur, it's lose-lose for a war-president.

...That's the conservative nightmare. Bush wins the war. The Democrats win what looks like a post-war election. The government stays big; but taxes are raised to pay for it. Maybe it won't happen. But if it does, one man will be responsible. George W. Bush: architect of a liberal take-over.

Dick Morris:

The key question in this election is whether we want a wartime or a peacetime president. In this respect, the contest most closely resembles the Winston Churchill-Clement Atlee battle of 1945. With World War II just recently won in Europe but still raging in the Pacific, British voters opted to back a candidate they trusted on healthcare, jobs and social services rather than on Churchill whose wartime leadership they valued highly.

Events, more than anything else, will determine which issue has priority in our minds. The ironies abound.

If Bush succeeds too well in quelling international terrorism, he could do himself out of a job, encouraging voters to assign higher value to domestic and economic issues and hence to the Kerry candidacy.

Peggy Noonan (yay!):

Here is my fear: that the American people, liking and respecting President Bush, and knowing he's a straight shooter with guts, will still feel a great temptation to turn to the boring and disingenuous John Kerry. He'll never do anything exciting. He doesn't have the guts to be exciting. And as he doesn't stand for anything, he won't have to take hard stands. He'll do things like go to France and talk French and they'll love it. He'll say he's the man who accompanied Teresa Heinz to Paris, only this time he'll say it in French and perfectly accented and they'll all go "ooh la la!"

The American people may come to feel that George W. Bush did the job history sent him to do. He handled 9/11, turned the economy around, went into Afghanistan, captured and removed Saddam Hussein. And now let's hire someone who'll just by his presence function as an emollient. A big greasy one but an emollient nonetheless.

I just have a feeling this sort of thing may have some impact this year. "A return to normalcy," with Mr. Kerry as the normal guy.

I find it encouraging that conservatives are developing such a rationale for Bush's defeat, but can we please avoid slandering Churchill by putting him in the same company?