Suppose John Kerry actually gets elected president. Here's what he has to look forward to.
On the economic front, most observers expect higher interest rates in late 2004. Kerry will face a sluggish economy, and perhaps a double-dip recession.
The reason for the higher interest rates is the Bush deficits. At some point soon, money markets will start demanding a better return if they are to keep buying government bonds.
To undo the fiscal mess, Kerry would be torn between reassuring Wall Street with a lot of deficit cutting, and trying to find some funds to restore domestic social investment.
Foreign policy and domestic security will not be pretty, either. As the focus shifts from imagined threats (Saddam Hussein) to real ones (the scandalously weak state of domestic preparedness against terrorist attack), a Kerry administration would need to spend more on everything from port security to Public Health Service monitoring of a possible biological or radiological attack.
On the foreign front, a Kerry administration would also need to spend more money, at least in the short run, to stabilize and honorably extricate the US from Iraq. Even a multilateral occupation force would demand a lot of American financial help.
If Democrats should feel depressed by the morning-after policy challenges a Kerry Administration would face, the politics would be even more daunting.
Congress will probably remain in Republican hands. On the House side, the combination of serious Republican gerrymandering and the dwindling number of truly contestable seats leave the Democrats needing to win about three-quarters of swing districts to take back Congress. That is mathematically possible, but it would take a Kerry landslide.
In the Senate, where Republicans now hold a margin of two, virtually every possible race would have to break for the Democrats for them to take back majority control. The Democrats have a decent chance of a pickup in Illinois, possibly in Colorado and Alaska, and conceivably Oklahoma, but four or five southern seats now in Democratic hands are vulnerable.
Even if the Democrats took back one house, or both, Congress would be very narrowly divided. The Republicans could be expected to try to stymie Kerry at every turn.
These realities have two important implications -- for how Kerry should campaign and how he should govern, if elected.
First, on the campaign trail, he should put forth a program and agoverning philosophy that makes sense in its own terms -- one that he believes in, and that's starkly different from Bush's. Forget trimming for the sake of legislative compromise. The Republicans would try to block whatever he put forward in any case.
Second, if Kerry does get elected, just about everything would have to be directed toward winning a few big, early legislative fights (or losing them in a way that made clear who the obstructionists were), and then going for a true governing majority in 2006.
In 1993 and 1994, Clinton took too long to get his prioritiesclear. The Republicans smelled blood in the water, blockedeverything, so that they could go into the 1994 mid-term election claiming that Clinton's was a failed presidency.
Say, for instance, that Kerry proposed rolling back most of the Bush tax cuts on people earning over $200,000, stepping up tax enforcement, and using the revenue proceeds half for deficit reduction and half for a package of homeland security, health care, education, energy independence and other social investments.
That would be better tonic for the economy than the Bush program, and it would be politically popular. Kerry would need to focus intensely, press hard on a few key issues in his first hundred days, and then, if the Republicans blocked him, take the fight to the country.
In 1994, Newt Gingrich "nationalized" politics by making Republicans a highly disciplined party with a national platform, the "Contract with America." The tactic worked. Kerry would need to turn this tactic around on them, draw dramatic differences between his program and theirs, and then take his case to the voters in 2006. This is exactly the opposite of what Clinton did in 1993and 1994, when he temporized, tried in vain to split the difference with a Republican leadership determined to destroy him, and split his own party on issues like NAFTA.
For Kerry, getting elected will be tough enough. Governing -- in the real world as opposed to Bush's -- will be much harder.
Robert Kuttner is co-editor of the Prospect. A version of this column originally appeared in The Boston Globe.
