[Ed. Note: An error appeared in an earlier version of this column. This is a corrected version. ]This week Democrats recorded impressive election wins in Virginia and Kentucky, and the polls continue to show that Americans are ready for a change. President Bush's job-approval rating, at 34 percent, is setting endurance records, and according to a Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll, Americans say they would support a Democrat by a 50 percent to 35 percent margin over a Republican to succeed the president.
So why then are Democrats, all of a sudden, increasingly concerned about 2008?
Part of the answer can be found in that same WSJ/NBC News poll in which the Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton is essentially in a dead-heat with her GOP counterpart Rudy Giuliani. In a direct match-up between the two of them, Clinton leads Giuliani 46 percent to 45 percent.
This is not how it was supposed to be. This was going to be an election that Democrats ran away with, the one that could salve the wounds of 2000 and 2004 and spare the country the agony of another nail-biter of an election night. If we were lucky, we thought it would provide some brief respite from the hand-to-hand political and cultural combat of the last two decades because we were going to vote on Iraq, and on that we were not so divided anymore. Well, so much for all that.
In truth, there was never any chance of a blowout. We know that whatever the political climate now, it is going to change once each party had a nominee. The Democratic strategy then was to tie the Republican nominee to Bush in hopes that the president's unpopularity would sink him. With Clinton looking the runaway Democratic winner, Republicans may have gotten the jump in that department.
"I think the '08 election is going to be about Senator Clinton and where she wants to take America," said Senate GOP Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky. "So the landscape next year, in my view, is going to be about this new Congress and its presidential nominee ... and where they want to take America."
This is not necessarily a landscape that a lot of Democrats are really comfortable with.
Clinton's fumbles in the last Democratic debate -- on immigration and her seeming inability to give a straight answer -- threw into sharp relief the fact that the GOP nominee will have a fair amount of Democratic vulnerability to work with if she is the nominee.
The last debate raised a fair number of uncomfortable questions for Democrats, not all of them about Clinton. It was a nightmarishly familiar scene: the equivocating, tap-dancing candidate unable, at the critical moment, to say exactly what she believed -- think Al Gore on guns or John Kerry on abortion and the $87 million that he voted for before he voted against. It undermined the growing sense that Clinton had been remade into a tougher, more solid candidate, who, whatever her other issues, was going to come ready to beat the Republicans at their own game.
Then there was Obama, who had promised to take it to Hillary. Over and over, when the chance presented itself to go for the jugular, he demurred. John Edwards, who most Democrats think can't win, was the one who seemed willing to confront the Clinton Inevitability Machine most directly. So in the end, despite relatively strong performances from nearly all their candidates, there were moments that reminded Democrats how often their party has looked wrong-footed, weak, and unsure of itself. This is a seminal fear which they had hoped they would not have to deal with any time soon.
It is not supposed to be this way. This is supposed to be their turn. (By my calculation, the stories about Democratic over-confidence will begin to appear around mid-December, in the final run-up to Iowa and the early primary states.) There are all kinds of hopeful signs to point to. For the first time in 10 years Democrats in Virginia took control of the state Senate, causing some to declare that the solidly red state was now decidedly purple, with a blue tint at the edges.
"The returns provided the sharpest evidence yet that Democratic gains in recent state elections represented more than a temporary dip in Republicans' popularity," reported Amy Gardner in the Washington Post, "Yesterday's initial results showed that a more long-term structural realignment may be occurring and that voters are increasingly drawn by Democrats' promises to improve schools and ease traffic and away from Republican conservatism on such issues as taxes and social policy, particularly in fast-growing Northern Virginia."
No Democrat has won Virginia since Lyndon Johnson in 1964, and very few have really tried since then. But while John Kerry and Al Gore both lost Virginia by 8 percentage points, Bill Clinton only lost by 2 points to Bob Dole. With the most popular politician in the state, Mark Warner, running for the Senate in 2008, suddenly Virginia is in play.
A little to the south and west, there was more good news. In the race for Kentucky governor, Democrat Steve Beshear defeated the incumbent Republican Gov. Ernie Fletcher in a race that in the end looked more like a horsewhipping than an election.
Beshear, a former attorney general and lieutenant governor, beat Fletcher by 18 points. And here, too, there was talk about the implications for 2008. The important features of the Kentucky race was the taint of corruption that Fletcher could not outrun and an over-energized grassroots campaign on left that was relentless in its attacks, a relentlessness that will now be aimed entirely at Sen. McConnell, who is up for re-election next year.
But Democrats are now trading in a lot more what-ifs. What if next year is not like this year? What if the party appears weak and wrong-footed again? And what if purple is, for now, just the new black?
