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Democrats talk about the Clinton impeachment backlash as the reason they don't want to impeach Bush, but since many are slightly older folks, they are probably remembering an older precedent--when Nixon resigned to escape impeachment over Watergate.
After a president resigned in disgrace for the first time in our history, you would think that his party would be utterly crushed in the next the presidential election. In reality, Carter barely won against Nixon's vice president, so the lesson seems to be that the public has a very, very short memory. A disgraced and out of power president is like a captured unabomber or Saddam--instantly demoted in the public imagination to a footnote, and since most people don't know what footnotes are, forgotten for them.
But Democrats are missing the subtler but crucial point--Ford did lose.
And it was largely because he pardoned Nixon.
It may indeed be easier for Democrats to win in '08 with a sitting Bush & Cheney, but if (by some miracle) they did impeach and/or remove them, they could run commercials and ask during debates if their republican opponents for congressional seats would hold an out of control president to account, which republicans failed to do for six years, or whether they would use their power to score cheap political points as they did to Clinton.
At the presidential level, they could ask two questions: would their opponent pardon Bush & Cheney (which hopefully President Pelosi had not already done) and which of the impeachable offenses of Bush would they not commit themselves? During the GOP primary debate, they seem to be falling all over themselves to embrace torture (with the exception of McCain), which is practically promising an impeachable offense before they even get in office.
Both questions would force them to choose between independent voters and their base, the latter disagreeing only with Bush's profligate spending and even that is muted because it went to the cause of killing A-rabs. The GOP base actually wishes Bush would have gone farther in most of his offenses and would probably be most comfortable with Ann Coulter as president and James Dobson as vice.
I would rather win a closer election this way than by a wider margin the way Democrats appear to be going at it.
But as much as I hate what the Democrats are doing, it shows they have learned a Machiavellian propaganda lesson from the GOP. They are not trying to sell their product. They are shaping events so the public will knock down their door demanding it.
They just better hope that the crowds knocking down that door aren't like the ones storming the Bastille.
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