Could Kerry possibly be reelected in 2008?

Was running this as a thought exercise yesterday

If Kerry was able to flip ohio essentially creating a reverse 2000 scenario in 2004 leading to his victory; could he possibly be reelected in 2008?

Obstacles:
Republican congress which may or may not feel like cooperating with him
Katrina
Continued difficulty in Iraq and Afgahnistan
Implosion of the mortgage market
A vice president who has a decent chance of imploding and being forced to resign

against that backdrop, is there any way he could survive to reelection against a credibleish candidate
 
If the Republicans nominate Rudi Giuliani and a third party social conservative splits the GOP vote.
 
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Obstacles:
Republican congress which may or may not feel like cooperating with him
Katrina
Continued difficulty in Iraq and Afgahnistan
Implosion of the mortgage market
A vice president who has a decent chance of imploding and being forced to resign

against that backdrop, is there any way he could survive to reelection against a credibleish candidate

Obstacles can sometimes be opportunities. But sometimes they're just sh*t sandwiches.

A) An opposition Congress isn't necessarily such a bad thing. You can always play the blame them game. But what about 2006 elections? Do the Democrats gain control of both houses? I think probably, but not by as big a margin as they did IOTL. Having Dems control both Congress and the White House when the 2008 mortgage and banking crises occurs makes them thoroughly own the problem.

B) Katrina. With butterflies (more airplane flights bringing soldiers back from Iraq?) does Katrina even occur. Maybe Kerry's and FEMA's responses are better, even a lot better than Bush's IOTL. But people ITTL have nothing to compare Kerry's response to. New Orleans and Louisianna's political leadership was so messed up, Katrina very likely to look real bad, even if the response was better. So he gets a black eye regardless.

C) Continued difficulty in Middle East. I don't see a surge happening under Kerry. The Sunnis may still realize that they are in bed with the devil that is AQI, so begin their fight against it regardless of whether US forces remain the same or are drawing downward. I'd predict under Kerry a slow draw down and an attempt under Secretary of State Biden to divide Iraq into three separate political entities. Kerry likely won't get any goodmarks whatever happens here. His anti-war base will generally approve. But Kerry after 4 years can still likely blame everything here on Bush.

D) Implosion of the mortgage market. And don't forget it went hand in hand with the unreported/unregulated trading of over the counter derivatives (OCDs) based on subprime mortgages by mega financial institutions many of whom insured these believed low risk OCD investments through AIG. This pig is going to start rolling in the mud by early 2008 regardless of who is in the White House and Congress. The Dems were in bed with Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac and both the Democrates and the Republicans with the Financial Institutions who loved donating money to both party's election campaigns. Google Brooksley Borne and what happened to her politically in the mid 90s when as Commissioner of the CFTC she proposed that companies would have to just report the occurence of an OCD. Crushed by both parties. A Kerry administration is not going to change any of this.

When rates started rising on subprime loans and under resourced borrowers could no longer re-finance their loans at lower rates in conjunction with rising appraised house values to gain the equity to pay their principle, this caused massive numbers of foreclosures. The OCDs which caused the crash were private agreements where a financial institution owning a large number of mortgages would make a bet with another institution in which B would pay A $500K a year and in the event a certain percentage of the mortgages went bad then B would pay A 10s of millions of dollars. So when huge numbers of foreclosures started happening in 2007, it was just a matter of time before the OCDs based on these belly up subprime loans started turning ugly, and the financial institutions holdings the wrong end of these OCDs had to pay up. Then, because finanicial institutions weren't required to report their OCDs to a centralized public warehouse, no financial institution knew which other financial institutions were over leveraged by their bad OCDs. So all the major banks stopped lending money to each other because no one wanted to be caught short by a particular bank if it went bankrupt. No loans, even single day or week long loans, no lubrication of finance to the economy. Economy then starts slowing down, severely. Now with Kerry in office, and likely a Democrat controlled Congress, they get blamed for the whole mess.

Can they respond better than the Bush financial team? Maybe. Probably a lot of the same players as were on Obama's financial team during his first 2 years are on Kerry's team. Smart guys all, but I wouldn't say they've worked miracles. So even if things are better, they are still going to look real, real bad to the average American. Kerry will likely not win many points with his handling of the economy leading up to election night.

D) John Edwards. He didn't start to have pants problems till 2006. Never heard of him having any other problems in this area. So I think its probable his extra marital issues are butterflyed away. That leaves in its non-butteflyed wake the sympathy of the American public over the return of his wife's cancer (which I don't think gets butterflyed away). So Edwards is a net plus come re-election.


So that leaves the question, "is there any way he could survive to reelection against a credibleish candidate"?

Credibleish is the key word in the question.

Its quite possible McCain has campaign problems similar to those he encountered IOTL, as he was not the best of campaigners strategically or tactically, but this time he might not work through them. As there was talk in 04 that Kerry might ask him to be VP, he also might choose not to run in 08 against his friend John Kerry.

If the economic crisis happens earlier, I think that improves the chances of Romney getting the nomination. McCain just not strong enough on economics to reassure the voter that this is the guy you want in charge in this kind of crisis. Romney still has an uphill battle winning it with his other issues with the core Republican primary voter.

Huckaby IOTL likely reached his max vote drawing potential.

If Romney has problems with the so called base, Guliani's problems dwarf that in comparison.

The only other probable candidate, who ran IOTL, is Fred Thompson. But based on the campaign he ran, he either didn't really understand what it takes to run a national campaign or he didn't truely want it enough to make the necessary effort.

I'd guess barring the appearance of someone who didn't try to run IOTL 08 that Romney or Thompson would likely run best against Kerry.


I think the 08 Kerry election situation would be similar to what Obama faces now. Obama loses to generic Republican candidate, but once a particular candidate is matched up, that candidates warts make the comparison between choices much more a 50-50 proposition.

So IMHO based the jokers IOTL who ran for the Republican nomination, 4 more years for Kerry in the White House.
 
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Its all about the economy.

Which likely wouldn't change due to the inevitably mutual non-cooperation between Kerry and the GOP congress. 2006 is a GOP landslide, and in 2008 we get President Liddy Dole (all the actual candidates in 2008 were snoozerific; just some creative license on my part)! ;). Then Souter and Stevens are replaced with 2 definite conservative judges, and 2010 and 2012 is anybody's guess
 
Perhaps hcallega can describe this scenario for us in Reporting for Duty. Looking forward to another update soon. Hope he doesn't forget about it.
 
Kerry could win reelection. One suspects that press reporting of things such as Katrina would be rather different with a different person at the helm.
 
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