LUDIC LOG

Here's how the Democrats can win the presidency in 2004:

They can't.

I mean this not as a slight against the candidates that they have managed to produce thus far, though they're hardly an inspiring pack. Aside from the frauds, clowns and remnants, it remains to be seen if the frontrunners can heed their own advice to not become "Bush Lite" (the phrase of Vinegar Joe Lieberman, who, of all the candidates, is the one closest to Bush Lite). They certainly have plenty of ammunition with which to carry the battle; the economy is in the tank and shows no sign of improving -- a factor which proved decisive against the first President Bush -- and, assuming any of them have the resolve to use it, there's no lack of scandalous behavior on the part of the current administration's friends and supporters. Bush has been a non-entity in social policy, a reckless maker of enemies in domestic and international policy, and a disaster in economic policy. If the candidate who emerges at the head of the pack for the opposition party can find a thin line between denouncing Bush's botched handling of the economy and coming across like a gloomy Carter-figure, there's no way he shouldnt be able to defeat him on matters of the checkbook. The president is likewise vulnerable on issues of crime, of culture, of cronyism, and of basic competence.

Unfortunately, the campaign won't be decided over any of those things.

In 1988, Michael Dukakis lost to the current president's father, and one of the primary reasons can be encapsulated in this quote: "This election is not about ideology -- it's about competence." Dukakis was wrong. Every election is about ideology. And the ideological issue that will decide the 2004 election was settled around noontime of September 11, 2001. The Democrats, who became so demoralized by their thrashing at the hands of Ronald Reagan's PR machine, have largely forsaken ideology, and spend most of their free time disassociating themselves from the radical elements of the voting public who find crypto-Republican centrists not to their liking. Eight years of Clinton has made the Democrats soft. They reacted to the events of the 2000 elections not with the called-for response -- a daily mantra about the theft of the presidency -- but with the timid, introspective soul-searching of someone who's not sure he's going to find a soul. The outlet for their suppressed rage was not its appropriate targets in the GOP, but the hateful, murderous, black-hearted souls who dared vote for Nader in defiance of the prearranged succession of one centrist for another. And this year, they will no doubt continue the pattern; they will select another competent centrist who is clearly superior to George W. Bush in every way, and who doesn't say anything too crazily leftist, too upsetting to the largely mythical "swing voters" -- and then, the day after election day, they will again shake their heads and wonder why they lost.

They will lose lose because they're playing a game by someone else's rules. A confidential memo written by Tony Blair in 1996 reads thus: "We really cannot think we have any chance of winning the 'Standing Up for Britain' argument if we appear to be anti-defence." And, since that had been selected as the theme of the upcoming elections -- the same memo outlined how all other campaign issues should be tied back to this notion of 'standing up for Britain' -- every aspect of the campaign had to be filtered through that lens. The same applies today. The GOP has made no secret of making September 11 the centerpiece of the upcoming elections; the process, indeed, has already begun. It is to be made literally unthinkable that any debate, any conversation, any political dialogue not have the terrorists attacks on America at their core. The Democrats, apparently, have no intention of contesting this; they will, despite early peeps of dissent, eventually come out as pro-defense, anti-terror, and generally on board with the centerpiece issue of 'national security'. With their fear of ideology, they will not dare to condemn the whole issue as a fraud, a sham, a dodge: and so they will lose. They cannot hope to compete with the incumbent Republicans in terms of being tough on terror. Their only chance is to refuse to take part in that argument.

As recently as this afternoon, Byron York of the National Review, in an opinion piece on NPR, noted that the country "doesn't feel safe enough to elect a Democrat", a theme you may count on being repeated ad infinitum throughout the next year and a half. Bush's father lost in 1992 because he and his cabinet were insufficiently ruthless to latch onto the idea of perpetual warfare. They didn't understand that a victory in Iraq was not enough; they didn't anticipate that once it was over, their bankruptcy of ideas on the domestic front would be their downfall. Today's GOP is not so naive. Already they cast about Asia and the Middle East for a new nemesis to keep the battles raging; already they stand in front of a poster of the falling towers and tell us of an eternal war against terror. They see George W. Bush as a latter-day Franklin Delano Roosevelt -- perpetually electable so long as the war rages -- when in fact he is but a national Rudolf Giuliani, an incompetent, crooked, self-serving, ineffectual boor thrust by circumstance into a false glory. But it's enough. The towers fell once, and it turned Giuliani from a failure to a saint; Bush will make them fall again and again to turn ignominy into glory.

Why am I writing this? In desperate hopes that I can work a sort of oppositional magic. In hopes that by committing my grim prophecy to words, I will damn it to not coming true. I, ever the materialist, am engaging in the oldest of jinxes. I'm talking during the no-hitter. I'm taunting fate. So, to caprice, to fortune: George W. Bush is unbeatable. He cannot fall.

Come and get me.