Talk about trouble coming not in single spies but in battalions. For much of his first term, almost everything that George Bush touched turned to political gold. He even managed to parlay a badly-handled war in Iraq into a vote winner. But now almost everything he touches turns to dust. The Democrats are quietly jubilant. They are seizing every chance they can get-and there are plenty of them—to brand the Republicans as the party of "corruption and cronyism". They seem to be recruiting good candidates for next year's elections. Some even wonder whether 2006 may be their equivalent of 1994—when the Republicans won 52 seats in the House and nine in the Senate, ending 40 years of Democratic rule. They should hold the champagne. Parties don't win elections just because their rivals hit a rough patch. They win them because they win the battle of ideas, because they think ahead and cook up cogent policies, because they offer a positive vision of the future. Bill Clinton did this brilliantly in 1992. Tony Blair did it even more brilliantly in 1997. But, so far, not the Democrats.
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