The analysis is facile. The list is incomplete. And it's only 2005.
Just because Hillary! has been running for President since 1993 does not mean the Republicans should be following suit. The public will tire of The Beast long before 2008. No Republican wants to suffer a similar fate.
First things first. The 2006 mid-terms loom large. If the Donks want to expend all their time and money worrying about the next election, I say we let them. Further Republican gains in 2006 will make them even more shrill, more desperate, more beholden to the moonbat wing of the party, and push them farther from the main-stream. If somebody had said that George Bush was going to run for President in 1997, 99.9% of people would have wondered why Poppy was going to jump back into that meat-grinder at his advanced age. The only people who are thinking about 2008 now are the Clintonistas, but that will come back to haunt them.
The rough-and-tumble of the Primary process will select the next 'Pubbie candidate. Contrary to the MSM's belief, candidates who emerge from bruising primaries do much better than candidates who are "coronated". A contested primary is one long campaign commercial, with lots of free media and public interest. Sure it costs money, but it raises a lot of money too.
If a candidate wins the nomination early, there are months and months between the end of campaigning and the nominating conventions. Think of how John F'n Kerry languished between the time he sewed up the Democratic nod and the Donk convention in Boston. He was old news by July.
But the candidates who have done well in the last thirty years -- LBJ, Nixon, Carter, Reagan, Dukakis (who did far better than he should have), Clinton, and George W. Bush -- all faced tough primary challenges that they beat back in the later stages. OTOH, candidates who had it sewed up early -- Ford, Mondale, GHWB, Dole, Kerry -- flamed out in the Fall. The one candidate in this group who actually won an election, GHWB, won on the strength of Reagan. All the other candidacies were completely devoid of interest and irreversibly stigmatized by the opposition campaign by the time the Fall campaign even got started.
The extreme example of this will be Hillary! 2008!!!. She will be such a known quantity by the Summer of 2008, she will be so negatively painted by all Republicans and the disaffected Donks as well, that nobody will even bother to give her a look. Meanwhile, the young and dynamic forces in the Democrat Party will be relegated to running for the VEEP spot on her losing ticket. It will have been 16 years since a genuine contender was allowed to emerge from the Donk field, and I don't think that party will benefit from the stagnation.
"This is such an "I got nuthin'" column, you wonder why Barnes bothered to write it."
You have hit the nail on the head with that statement.
Good analysis. Including this: "Further Republican gains in 2006 will make them even more shrill, more desperate, more beholden to the moonbat wing of the party, and push them farther from the main-stream."
Many people I talk to fear a Hillary candidacy, while, at the same time, overlooking 2006. First things first. Let's clobber them in '06.
I've said it before and I'll say it again, Hillary will not win the dem nomination, no chance. She is the most polarizing and divisive politician in America today. Liberal moveon.org types don't trust her because of her vote for war in Iraq, and more moderate dems don't trust her chances of winning because they know she won't be able to take away one Red State. While it's way too early to predict who the nominee of each party will be, I'll go out on a limb with these picks:
Evan Bayh or Joe Biden for the dems
John McCain or George Allen for the Repubs.
I support George Allen, but I fear McCain will try and possibly succeed in wooing some conservatives by standing very tough on federal spending.