Abiola at Foreign Dispatches says this editorial was first published by the Wall Street Journal. I'm glad it was published somewhere a cheapskate like me could get at it.

September 03, 2004
IT is doubtless not the most tactful question to ask on the day of the official Republican nomination of George W. Bush for president, but might it not be better for American conservatism if Bush failed to win a second term?

…Many Conservatives today would agree that it would have been far better for their party if Major had lost the election of 1992. For one thing, the government deserved to lose. The decision to take the UK into the European exchange rate mechanism had plunged the British economy into a severe recession. For another, Labour's Neil Kinnock had all the hallmarks of a one-term prime minister. It was indeed Kinnock's weakness as a candidate that finally enabled Major to scrape home with a tiny majority of just 21 out of 651 seats in the House of Commons. Had Kinnock won, the exchange rate crisis of September 1992 would have engulfed an inexperienced Labour government and the Conservatives, having replaced Major with a more credible leader, could have looked forward to an early return to office.

Instead, the next five years were a kind of Tory dance of death, in which the party not only tore itself apart over its European policy but also helped to tear Bosnia apart by refusing all assistance to those resisting Serbian aggression. Meanwhile, a spate of petty sexual and financial scandals discredited one minister after another, making a mockery of Major's call for a return to traditional family values ("Back to Basics"). All of this provided the perfect seedbed for the advent of New Labour and the election by a landslide of Tony Blair in May 1997. Well, Blair is still in Downing Street and, having weathered the worst of the political storm over Iraq, seems likely to remain there for years to come.

Could something similar be about to happen in the US? In my view, the Bush administration, too, does not deserve to be re-elected. Its idee fixe about regime change in Iraq was not a logical response to the crisis of September 11. Its fiscal policy has been an orgy of irresponsibility. Given the hesitations of independent voters in the key swing states, the polls point to a narrow Bush defeat. Yet Kerry, like Kinnock, is the kind of candidate who can blow an election in a single soundbite. It's still all too easy to imagine Bush, like Major, scraping home by the narrowest of margins (not least, of course, because Bush did just that four years ago).

But then what? The lesson of British history is that a second Bush term could be more damaging to the Republican Party and more beneficial to the Democrats than a Bush defeat. If he secures re-election, Bush can be relied on to press on with a foreign policy based on pre-emptive military force, to ignore the impending fiscal crisis (on the Dick Cheney principle that "deficits don't matter") and to pursue socially conservative objectives such as the constitutional ban on gay marriage. Anyone who thinks this combination will serve to maintain Republican Party unity is dreaming; it will surely do the opposite. Meanwhile, the Democrats will have another four years to figure out what the British Labour Party finally did: It's the candidate, stupid. And when the 2008 Republican candidate goes head-to-head with the American Tony Blair, he will get wiped out.