There's a flaw in the slaw, Kevin.
If Dubya gets rolled in November, then there's a good chance that other GOP candidates further down the ticket will get rolled too. When the top of a party's ticket does badly, the rest of the ticket suffers. Thus there's no guarantee that a President Dean or a President Kerry will have a GOP Congress as a counter-balance. Conservatives can beat Bush by staying home on election day, but they'll kill off the rest of the ticket and hand a real socialist a "mandate" in the process
Socialists always claim a "mandate". It was everything Clinton could do to restrain himself from claiming one in 1992, when he'd have been laughed out of town for saying something like that. Didn't stop his shock troops from trying to claim it for him......liberals were running around telling the middlebrow opinion magazines that Liberalism had finally "won history", that the conservative Thermidor and its long dialogue between the competing value systems was over, and it was finally time to crystallize the perfection of the Socialist Progressive synthesis, carve it into the stone of law, and start jailing "hate speech" purveyors. My memory isn't as good as it used to be, but I remember that essay.