Matt Towery, writing today at Townhall.com, says, "Bush's only potential Achilles heel remains the economy. That possibility has political pundits wondering whether they can go ahead and script a Bush post-war nosedive -- a la Bush senior in 1992 -- or if the president's re-election campaign will more closely resemble the GOP landslides of Nixon in '72 and Reagan in '84."
I don't know, I see another couple of potential roadblocks. It's clear that there is a power struggle going on between Colin Powell's State Department and Donald Rumsfeld's Defense Department. If either side wins decisively, than it could have negative repercussions. If Rumsfeld wins, than Bush will lose one of the few moderating forces in his presidency, and if Colin Powell is humiliated, and Bush Lets it happen, well, the Democratic candidate doesn't have to be a political genius to exploit that. If Colin Powell wins, which, let's be honest, has no chance of happening, than Bush will lose his base, and might lose the war as an issue--Rumsfeld has cleverly positioned himself as the military face of this administration.
The other potential problem is that Bush may have ceded the centrist position. He may be forced to run as an ideological conservative, which liberals may be able to turn into an issue. This is more of a long shot though.
And at any rate, we have nearly a year before the actual campaign starts, so we'll see what happens in between now and then.
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