There are times when a loss is arguably good for a political party. Some made arguments to that effect in 2004 (I made some of them), and, as Kevin Drum says in retrospect, they're fairly convincing -- it's impossible to imagine conservatism collapsing as it has had Kerry entered office midway through the Iraq War and a couple of months before Katrina. And without conservatism collapsing, it's impossible to imagine 2006's sharp reversal, which returned both chambers of Congress to Democratic control. And without the 2008 election, the new fundraising model and the infrastructure construction and the downballot effects of the Obama campaign would not have emerged, and my sense is that they're fairly transformational events in progressive politics. Additionally, Kerry's loss meant relatively little to the psyche of progressive politics. Kerry was always a compromise. He seemed like what the country wanted. His eventual defeat was, if anything, a repudiation of the politics of tough guy posturing that have consistently been used as a cudgel against forthrightly progressive candidates. But losing is not always a good thing for a political party. And Bill Kristol's tongue-in-cheek column comforting liberals in case of an Obama loss rather explains why. An Obama loss, Kristol argues, would be a ratification of all sorts of things liberals should believe in, like the surge and the imperialist impulse in foreign policy and lying to fake plumbers about the distributive fairness of upper-income tax cuts. It would, in other words, be a ratification of conservatism. Unlike in 2004, there's no real confusion over which side is which, and while Republicans will be able to say they compromised the One True Faith by choosing John McCain rather than Tom Tancredo, liberals will have no such refuge. An Obama loss would mean rather more for liberalism than a Kerry loss did, because it would be liberalism losing as liberalism. Sometimes, there's nothing counterintuitive about election results at all.
