Here is a New Year's prediction: Heading toward the 2004 election, the word that Democrats will use most in attacking President Bush, his administration, and his re-election campaign will be "balance." That word will be used to suggest that Bush is not a bad person and that his ideas aren't all wrong, but his priorities aren't right and he doesn't have the interests of all of the people in mind.
By its very nature and rules, Congress undergoes certain changes every two years at this point. But in some respects, given the relatively small number of retirees and incumbents losing re-election, fewer changes than normal are taking place as legislators and staff return to Capitol Hill this week. While veteran lawmakers like Republican Sens.
If the many announcements that various Democrats are or are not running for president weren't enough to signal the start of the 2004 campaign, the fight that broke out over competing economic stimulus packages surely was. The differences between the proposals offered by President Bush and by House Democrats provide an early outline of how the 2004 presidential campaign debate may shape up.
Although history tells us there is absolutely no relationship between a president's job approval rating during his first 33 months in office and whether he was subsequently re-elected, it is still interesting to watch a president's poll numbers before that time marker for signs of potential vulnerability or enduring strength.
Conventional wisdom tends to cast the 6-point advantage the Republicans had in last year's total popular vote for the U.S. House as the truest measure of the relative strength of the two major parties.
With six virtually announced contenders in the wide-open contest for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2004, and at least four more in varying degrees of consideration, there are as many theories of what will happen as people who are thinking about it.
How disheartening it must have been for the president to wake up on the day he was to deliver an incredibly important State of the Union address and to hear immediately that the
Conference Board's Consumer Confidence rating had just fallen to a nine-year low. But ever since Republicans did unexpectedly well in the November 5 midterm elections, they've heard a lot of bad news.
With the fight for the 2004 Democratic presidential nomination under way and Americans appropriately preoccupied with the Columbia tragedy this past weekend and the probability of war in the next two months, it's easy to forget that congressional elections are just 21 months away. In many ways, this election cycle will look familiar.
At this embryonic stage in the creation of the next Democratic presidential nominee, ranking the contenders is mostly guesswork, because there are few meaningful ways to measure who is ahead and by how much. However, by early April, the campaigns with the most to brag about financially will begin leaking estimates of how much they have raised in 2003. The ill-fated 1995-96 campaign of then-Sen.
