Counter-factuals are endlessly debatable, but I find it extremely difficult to imagine a scenario in which Barack Obama would have been elected in 2008 had Bush not invaded Iraq.  I also  believe a good deal (not all, by any means) of the Republican Party's poor image today can be traced back to Iraq.  It is easy to scoff and say that "political" considerations should not affect "national security" decisions -- but that's nonsense.  Unless it's a matter of national survival, of course they should.  They are part of the total cost/benefit calculation.  And in retrospect, it's clear that the cost -- even beyond the thousands killed and wounded -- has been extraordinarily high.  Too high.

Me too.  It's this, more than anything else, that makes me think he really is just a partisan ideologue and not a well-intentioned (though severely misguided) leader.  This should be a no-brainer for him, and would be of much greater long-term benefit to African Americans -- and everyone else -- than all the "disparate impact" studies dreamed up by by Holder & Co.  But he won't do it, because at heart he really cares more about ideology and partisan politics than about people.  Tragic.

Indeed.  Bill is still a loyal Democrat at heart.  He would simply issue a dignified statement saying that it is not his role to interfere in the job America's leaders were elected to do, along with a few pointed barbs about GOP grandstanding and inability to work with the President, and we'd be back at ground zero.

And even if Clinton were tempted, Obama would send an unmanned drone to Chappaqua before he'd allow something like this to happen.

Interesting.  Although I live in a solid blue state (Illinois), the suburbs in my neck of the woods are fairly purple -- Mark Kirk country -- and my immediate neighborhood is pretty red.  McCain signs out-numbered Obama signs last time around by a wide margin.  This year I have yet to see a single Romney yard sign -- not one.  And the bumper stickers, which were about even in '08, tilt noticeably Obama this year.

This could mean the Romney campaign is just better focused than McCain's and chooses not to waste even small sums on electoral votes it has no chance of winning.  But by that logic, they ought to have nothing going on in California, New York, etc.  Is that the case?

Or, it could be evidence that the Romney team's "ground game" isn't actually all that good....

A really terrific collection so far.  Agree wholeheartedly with most of these.  A few additions to consider:  Disraeli by Robert Blake (to be paired up with Jenkins' Gladstone if at all possible).  I found the first quarter or so, which focuses on Disraeli's early career as a novelist, to be a bit slow, but after than I couldn't put it down.  Hitler and Stalin by Alan Bullock -- a fascinating account of the parallel and very similar lives of two of the three great monsters of the 20th century.  Lord Randolph Churchill by Winston S. Churchill -- a bit less polished and grand than Marlborough, but in some ways a better book, since the author manages to make the life and career of a second-rate Victorian politician very nearly as interesting as that of the famous Captain-General who defeated Louis XIII.  Plus, at two volumes it's less of a slog than Marlborough's four.

You know, you could look at this and conclude that it just doesn't matter all that much who the President is, at least from a macroeconomic perspective.  Of the four biggest job-creating administrations, two were D and two were R.  Of the five administrations with the highest unemployment rates, three have been R and two have been D.  Three of the four lowest unemployment rates belong to Reagan (the most conservative) and Truman and Johnson (the most domestically liberal).

My own view is that there are lots and lots and lots of other reasons to send Barry O off to an early and lucrative retirement, but that the economy as a whole is going to prosper, or not, as a result of changes in productivity, technology, international competitiveness, European stability, and so on -- and a lot less as a result of who calls 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue home.

Of course this isn't going to be a cakewalk.  I'm actually surprised Sabato puts it as close as this.

To MBFan's point above -- the only elected incumbents in my lifetime who've lost have been Carter and Bush.  In each case the incumbent's party was far from enthusiastic, and there was a serious challenge to the incumbent other than just the main opposition candidate (Kennedy, Perot).  None of that applies today.

I don't have the data at my fingertips, but something like 40-45% of the electorate today is made up of core, overwhelmingly Democratic constituencies -- blacks, non-Cuban Hispanics, young single women, union households, urban/academic upscales....  Absent dissension in those ranks -- and there is none today -- the Dem doesn't need to carry all that many independents in order to win.

That this is immensely depressing doesn't make it any less true.

They looked at Hitler like that, too....  Aren't there some good file photos in some database somewhere of young frauleins gazing reverently at der Fuehrer?  They must look nearly identical to this one.

This guy and his campaign are just so unbelievably creepy that, jaded and cynical as I am about the mainstream media, I'm actually surprised some of them haven't started taking some serious jabs at this kind of stuff yet.

You lost me with "theory of the film."  Reminded me of Tom Wolfe's The Painted Word -- "art isn't art unless it has a theory."  Who was the German notable whose comment on the music of the day was, "Give us someding ve can hum"?  Give me entertainment, a diversion, not something that forces me to elucidate a "theory."  Especially not a theory about soap.

If Carter -- who at least appointed Volcker, began deregulation, believed in balanced budgets (though he wasn't able to produce one), and even (however belatedly) began the military buildup that Reagan accelerated -- was "dreadful," what word would you use to describe Obama?  Does even the magnificent English language stretch that far?

Peter -- having lived in both places, my sense is that a lot of what got "turned around" in New York had to do with lawlessness -- things that were supposed to happen but didn't, or things that weren't supposed to happen but did. A powerful government can almost always "fix" lawlessness. New York remains hugely dysfunctional and unpleasant in a lot of ways, propped up economically only by the concentration of the financial industry there, which pumps emormous amounts of money into the city, and which nearly everyone, left or right, is determined to protect (see: Schumer, D-Wall Street).California's problems, however, are mainly problems of the laws themselves. Without fundamentally different attitudes on the part of a clear majority of the population, I do not see a solution. Only a real crisis is likely to effect change in enough people's attitudes; continued slow decay will not do it.The more I follow "developments" in The Golden State, the less I miss the place. I'd invite you to consider Chicago -- which for now is a very fine place to live -- but I fear we're really only a decade or two behind California.

Unlikely to take the Senate?  Are you kidding me?  After 4 years of Obamacare, and  bailouts, and elitism, and high unemployment, and absolutely staggering deficits, and with the Dems having twice as many seats to defend, we can't find a way to pick up a measly 3 or 4 seats?  There is something seriously wrong with the Republican Party.  If the White House and Senate were held by Republicans under these conditions, everyone would be expecting a blowout in November, and they would be right.  This is immensely frustrating and immensely depressing.

I hope all those oil and gas men are enjoying their day in the sun, because they're about to have a very large part of what they're working and investing for taken away from them so that women everywhere can enjoy their God-given right to free birth control, and cowboys everywhere their God-given right to subsidized poetry festivals.

Faugh!

Really???  That's not my experience of how it's used.  Wikipedia -- citing Merriam-Webster -- notes: "The accepted denotative meaning is a sexually promiscuous woman."

To a very large number of Americans, having sex with one's "steady" boyfriend or girlfriend does not qualify -- not by a long shot -- as "promiscuous."

Unfortunately, I don't think this is quite just a quibble.  A long time ago a wise (and conservative) professor of mine said -- in pre-Reagan days -- "An awful lot of otherwise sensible people think conservatives are just preppies who are against sex."

A lot of people on our side still give the impression that the only sex the're not "against" is that between a man and woman in marriage.  This puts a vary large number of Americans -- almost surely a majority -- in the "against" camp.  The majority of these, I'd wager, are not promiscuous.  By lumping all sexually active non-married people together -- whether one calls them sluts or merely tsk-tsks moral disapproval -- conservatives do their cause no favors electorally.

Hate to be a wet blanket, but what matters is not whether "Romney is Reagan" but whether "Obama is Carter" -- as thelonious notes above.  Unfortunately -- electorally, at least -- he's not.  By this point in his presidency, Carter's approval numbers had tanked for good.  He was in the 30s, not pushing 50.  He was undergoing a tough primary challenge from Ted Kennedy that left a large part of the Democratic base alienated.  And he never had the media and the rest of the so-called elites in his corner the way Obama does -- they thought he was some sort of redneck, evangelical hick.   And in spite of all of this, the race was nearly a dead heat until Reagan's masterful performance in the second debate, one week before the election.

The road ahead will be tough.  I would love to have some genuine reasons for optimism, but this doesn't do it for me.

Could not  a blogger at the Daily Kos or some such site have written, in February 2010, "The 2008 election gave Democrats a sweep of historic proportions.  Does anyone think that the voters who provided this victory have just thrown in the towel since then?  Or changed their minds about Barack Obama? ..."

The problem is that "the voters" are not "the voters" -- an entity.  "The voters" are a small-ish group of committed "movement liberals," a small-ish group of committed "movement conservatives," and a larger number of people who range from sort-of liberal, through moderate, to sort-of conservative, who are simply not that invested in the Manichean struggle of Left vs. Right, and who are, in a word, fickle.

Which is exactly what one Ronald Wilson Reagan was in 1980....