New York Times, January 31, 2007,  6:08 pm
The Future President Clinton

As I survey the political scene, I don’t think it’s too soon to make a firm prediction about the 2008 presidential race. I think Hillary Clinton will be the next president of the United States.

The way I see it, the only reason Al Gore and John Kerry didn’t win in 2000 and 2004 is that they ran two of the worst campaigns in American political history. Yet both lost only by the skin of their teeth.

Yes, I know that Gore received more of the popular vote than George W. Bush did, and many people believe the election was stolen from him. But the election never should have been close enough for that to be possible. He was a sitting vice president at a time of peace and prosperity. Consequently, Gore should have won by a margin large enough to preclude any challenge.

While it is true that Bush ran a pretty good campaign in 2000, it wouldn’t have been enough to win had Gore run a half-competent campaign. All he had to do, really, was assure the American people that he would continue Bill Clinton’s economic and foreign policies. People may have had doubts about Clinton’s personal behavior, but they had no doubts about his policies: they liked them. In November 2000, his favorable/unfavorable ratio in the Gallup poll was 63 percent to 33 percent.

For reasons I have never understood, Gore was reluctant to run as Clinton’s heir and tried to reinvent himself. In the process, he essentially threw away all the advantages of incumbency. He lost votes among loyal Democrats who saw his implicit repudiation of Clinton as disloyalty, while picking up none among independents. In the end, Gore couldn’t even carry his home state of Tennessee �?a very rare occurrence in American political history.

Gore should have run the same sort of campaign that George H.W. Bush ran in 1988. Basically, Bush Sr. told the American people that he would simply fulfill Ronald Reagan’s third term. That was good enough, and it would have worked for Gore, too.

In 2004, Kerry lacked Gore’s advantage of incumbency and had to run against a sitting president �?a difficult thing to do under the best of circumstances. But like Gore, Kerry seemed reluctant to use the Clinton record to his advantage. Kerry seemed to run as if the election were his to lose, and his campaign never developed a really coherent message except that he was not George W. Bush.

Such a strategy perhaps made sense on paper �?Bush’s favorable and unfavorable ratings were both at 47 percent in the days before the election. But in the end, people wanted more from Kerry than he was willing to provide in terms of a vision for the future, and they decided to stick with the devil they knew.

In 2008, I see none of the factors that doomed Gore and Kerry coming into play. If Hillary Clinton is the Democratic nominee, as I expect she will be, I don’t see her running away from her husband’s record; she couldn’t even if she wanted to. She doesn’t need to make a lot of extravagant promises about what she will do in office, because people are ready for a change. All she has to do is convince people she won’t screw things up and will undertake the messy job of cleaning up the messes Bush will be leaving behind in Iraq and at home.

The Republicans, in contrast, are in dreadful shape. Bush has put them in a deep hole by virtue of both his policies and his unwise decision to keep Dick Cheney on as vice president. Even if one thought that Cheney was doing a brilliant job, it was clear that he was not going to be a viable presidential candidate in 2008. Therefore, Bush, too, threw away all the advantages of incumbency that might have rescued his party. Like many presidents before him �?Franklin Roosevelt in particular, who had three different vice presidents �?Bush should have replaced Cheney in 2004. He might have chosen someone who could use the experience to secure the Republican nomination, such as Colin Powell or Condoleezza Rice.

With no sitting vice president, the Republican field is wide open. I had thought that Senator John McCain of Arizona had the nomination pretty well sewn up, but he made a very poor strategic decision last year to essentially run as Bush’s heir. McCain is now so thoroughly identified with Bush’s unpopular Iraq policy, I don’t see how he can win. In effect, McCain has all the disadvantages of incumbency with none of its advantages.

Unfortunately, the Republicans�?best potential candidate is Jeb Bush, the president’s brother and the governor of Florida. Under any other circumstances, the Republican nomination would be his, and he would be a formidable candidate in the general election. But he knows that 2008 is not his year. The American people need a break from the Bush family. Jeb will probably be the Republican nominee in 2012.

Who the Republicans will end up nominating, I don’t know. It doesn’t really matter, because I don’t see anyone now running or standing in the wings who has a prayer against the Democratic nominee, whether it’s Clinton or someone else. My reasoning is simple: I just don’t believe that the Democratic Party will run three historically bad campaigns in a row. All the Democratic contender has to do is just not screw up and he or she will win. The fact that Gore and Kerry almost won even though their campaigns were terrible is proof of this.

I do not believe that Senator Barack Obama is a serious threat to Senator Clinton or likely to get the nomination. He’s too young, unseasoned and inexperienced. For now, he is a fresh face and someone the anti-Clinton forces can rally around. But I think Obama knows that 2008 is not his year, and he is simply letting the world know that he will be a force to reckon with in the future, as John F. Kennedy did in 1956 and Ronald Reagan did in 1968. Moreover, Obama might make a good running mate for Clinton. After a few years as vice president, he would be well-positioned to become our nation’s first black president. But 2008 is too soon.