Is the White House Worth It This Year?

Is the presidency really a prize this year? Will taking over in January effectively kill the winning party for the next couple of election cycles?

Naturally, winning the Oval Office is the highest political plum in the land. Politicians with progressive ambition work their entire lives in electoral politics holding the possibility of a successful White House run in the backs of their minds. This explains the normal but excessive caution most office-holders and -seekers apply to their jobs. One nasty gaffe - played over and over again on TV - can ruin a perfectly good career.

Does this logic hold for '08?

We're in the fifth year of a long, grinding war, and while the surge has been successful, it's still too early to claim total victory. We need to be in country at some substantial level much longer, with more than a token "residual force" needed to protect, say, nothing more than the U.S. embassy in Baghdad.

Not only that, the economy's certainly looking forward to some rough times ahead. Even if we don't buy all the doom-and-gloom coming from the Democrats and the press, it'll be years before the housing market's and resumes a reasonably steady path of appreciation, and more big financial institutions are likely to collapse before things get turned around (or we're likely in for some more huge government bailouts, which can't be sustained for long while still calling this a free-market economy. Washington Mutual's planned $5 billion infusion may avoid that bank's collapse in the short term).

I've thought about the growing "perfect storm" of policy difficulties in the context of John McCain's success in wrapping up the GOP nomination.

In 2000, had he taken the nomination from George W. Bush, he would have taken over the executive branch at a time of relative peace and prosperity. A McCain administration in the early 2000s would have, of course, faced the terrorist attacks of September 11 and the subsequent economic recession, but as deeply painful as those crises were, this year really does look like a fundamentally different year in politics - perhaps 2008 could even turn out to be a political earthquake on the scale of the 1860 and 1932 elections, particularly if a Democrat wins the White House.

So should an apiring candidate for presidency relish the challenges of the new era, or dread a long clean-up period upon election to a first term of office (Matthew Yglesias is already downgrading the presidency for next year, arguing that the surge has left "the Iraq War into the next president's problem." Will the elections this year deliver a favorable congressional majority? Can a new occupant hold together his party coalitions Washington and in the electorate?

Charlie Cook's got an article up on these problems at National Journal:

Should Republicans want to hold onto the presidency in 2008?

It sounds like a stupid question, and maybe it is. But one thing that has been true over the last couple of decades is that both parties have enormously strong self-destructive tendencies. If left to their own devices, they will do themselves in. To give one party the White House and majorities in the House and Senate is like a ticking time bomb; it's only a matter of time before it explodes and the party loses, and loses big.

While conceding that the last year has supplied more unexpected twists and turns than any presidential election year since 1968, it is nearly certain Democrats will retain majorities in the Senate and House after this election. My hunch is that Democrats will pick up three to six Senate seats, bringing them from a 51-49 majority to somewhere between 54-46 to 57-43.

In the House, the Cook Political Report is being pretty conservative, with a current forecast of a Democratic gain of five to 10 seats, but the chance of bigger gains is much greater than the chance of smaller gains.

At this point in time, Illinois Sen. Barack Obama has a 95-percent chance of winning the Democratic nomination. The window for New York Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton to win enough pledged delegates to persuade superdelegates to vote for her is pretty much closed.

She can't win the remaining contests by sufficient margins to appreciably close the gap at this point, and superdelegates are breaking more toward Obama than Clinton. Short of a Rev. Jeremiah Wright-level embarrassment visiting Obama each week for four or five consecutive weeks, this thing is over.

So what about the general election? Tracking polling by the Gallup Organization of around 4,400 registered voters conducted Tuesday through Friday, Wednesday through Saturday and Thursday through Sunday shows presumed GOP nominee John McCain and Obama tied at 45 percent. The Arizona senator had a 2-point lead over Clinton in all three sets of tracks, matching the error margin.

This race is more likely to be determined by events or circumstances that have yet to develop than anything specific we can point to today. But it is also true that a Democrat needs to be ahead in the popular vote, measured by national polls, by at least a point or two in order for that to dependably translate into an Electoral College majority.

Simply put, the Republican vote is much more efficiently allocated around the country. Aside from Nebraska and Maine -- states that apportion their electoral votes in part by who wins congressional districts -- once a state is won by a single vote, there is no bonus for winning big. The rest of the votes count in the national polls like all others, but have no impact on the outcome of the election.

Aha! The GOP vote's more efficiently allocated nationally than that of the Democrats'.

But let's not get too excited. Here's Cook:

But this brings us back to the original point. Should Republicans want to win? If Democrats win the presidency and hold onto the House and Senate, how long will it be before they self-destruct?

Democrats had majorities in the House and Senate when Bill Clinton was elected president in 1992, and it took the party only two years to lose majorities in both. For Republicans, they already had control of the House and Senate when George W. Bush won in 2000. It took six years before they self-destructed, losing majorities in both chambers.

Lord Acton is famous for his line that "power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely." It is debatable how much is corruption, how much is arrogance and overreaching, and how much is sloth or growing out of touch, but the result is the same. Whether it is Democrats or Republicans, conservatives or liberals, too much unchecked power is an inevitable problem.

A different way of approaching it is that every decade or two, a party has to destroy itself and be reborn. Like forests need fire to begin the regeneration process, from time to time, parties need the dead wood cleared out and space made for new growth to emerge. But to rise like a phoenix, you have to get down to ashes first.

As painful as 2006 was for the GOP, the party did not appear to hit rock bottom. A good case can be made that the Republican Party would be a stronger, better party five years from today if it reconstituted itself now.

An argument can be made that McCain is such a iconoclastic, nontraditional Republican that he could represent and bring change to the party. He could perhaps decrease its emphasis on cultural and religious issues, a move many see as important. Whether he could lead that rebirth without the GOP actually losing the White House is an interesting question.

All of this is fine to say from the cheap seats. But in the real world, competitors always play to win. Republicans and Democrats should fight this election as if there were no tomorrow. That's the way it should be.

Hmm, iconoclastic, non-traditional? Go McCain!