afternoon cheer

Just in case you're frantically clicking around the web for news (and who isn't this afternoon?) here's two pieces of interest.

First: Kerry's chief pollster throws in the towel.

For months, though, I’ve been assessing President Bush’s vulnerability, but win or lose, it is important to acknowledge the daunting challenge Sen. John Kerry faces. Republicans have been spinning this fact for months and they are right.

First, we simply do not defeat an incumbent president in wartime. After wars surely, but never in their midst. Republicans have been spinning this fact for months, and they are correct.

Yes, he ends on a hopeful note for Kedwards. But the subtext is nonetheless the scarlet letter that Gerard Van der Leun divined so clearly months ago: not A, but L.

The second piece is from a couple of weeks back, in the decidedly non-conservative British periodical The Economist. It's not an election prediction as such—but rather, a prognosis for the Democratic Party's long term fortunes.

In a word: bleak.

Mr Bush is one of the most enthusiastic party-builders to have occupied the White House. Several earlier presidents deliberately snubbed their parties: Richard Nixon pursued a strategy of “lonely victory” in 1972, while Bill Clinton adopted a policy of “triangulation”, adopting whatever Republican ideas seemed likely to win votes. George Bush senior didn't so much snub his party as ignore it. But his son threw all the prestige of his post-September 11th presidency behind campaigning for congressional Republicans in 2002. He has worked closely with other party-builders on Capitol Hill, particularly Dennis Hastert and Tom DeLay in the House and Bill Frist in the Senate.

Meanwhile, the Democrats' party organisation is fraying. For decades the labour unions have provided both shoe leather and organisational glue for the Democrats. But the proportion of the workforce belonging to unions has shrunk from 30% in 1950 to 13% today. Trial lawyers have replaced trade unionists as the party's main paymasters, but they are too few in number (and too busy) to hold the party together in the same way. Women and black groups are also too focused on their own interests. The party was losing ground to single-issue pressure groups even before the 527s came along. […]

The second reason why the Republicans have more to gain from a victory in November is that they think they can use a second Bush term to turn themselves into America's de facto ruling party. Grover Norquist, the head of Americans for Tax Reform, may be exaggerating when he says that “the Democratic Party is toast” if Mr Bush wins. But the Republicans have put emasculating the Democrats at the very heart of their second-term agenda. They plan to reduce its footsoldiers by contracting out hundreds of thousands of federal jobs, to reduce its income through tort reform (which may slim down the lawyers' wallets) and right-to-work laws (which will allow workers to opt out of union dues). And they plan to boost the number of people who own shares—and hence a stake in the success of the capitalist system—by beginning to privatise Social Security.

The Republican aim is to do to the Democrats what Mr Blair has so successfully done to the Tories in Britain: marginalise them so completely that they degenerate into a parody of a political party. No wonder the Democrats are fighting so hard this year. And no wonder they hate the party-builder in the White House with such a furious passion.

Sweet.

But if you haven't yet, go vote.