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A Thought Experiment:
Mike Ahlf
Presuming:
(A) that John Kerry had won the 2004 Presidential Election, and
(B) that, acting on the same information that President Bush has at his disposal, had kept our troops in Iraq and done things mostly the same way;
Answer the following question: what percentage of the current Democrats/War Protesters would still be protesting, and what percentage of the current hawks on the Republican/Conservative side would be protesting instead for some reason?
Bonus Points: What does this reveal about the state of current politics?
Observations
I'm not comfortable with the assumption that Kerry would have done things "mostly the same way".
Barring that, though, I think the primary difference would be style. After 5 years of an administration very disinclined to compromise, many people's frustrations with Bush are reaching a boiling point (and not just Democrats). Whether or not Kerry's actions were much different, his persona most certainly would have been, and I think he would have been given some slack for coming into a situation he was less involved in creating. I'm sure there would still be war protests, but probably less of the "blame game" stuff going on alongside them. At least, not until he'd had a couple of years of minimal progress.
I'm also trying to imagine conservative hawks protesting the lack of a war and having some difficulty.
It depends. I think for better or worse, Iraq will always be considered Bush's war. I don't think that the conservatives would be calling for faster withdrawal. They would probably be launching theories on how Kerry is going to abandon Bush's war effort and trying to figure out a way that they could blame Kerry if worst comes to worse. They'd probably be trying to differentiate between Bush's "winning" strategy and Kerry's "defeatist" strategy so that they can tack any success to Bush (in spite of Kerry's cowardice) and any failure to Kerry (in spite of Bush's heroic efforts).
Liberal politicos would be taking the opposite tact. They'd have pointed to what they now call Bush's "hollow victories" (the drafting of the constitution, for example) as proof that Bush mismanaged the war. The line of the day would be that Kerry is "cleaning up Bush's mess," which is basically what Kerry was saying that he'd do.
So it would be different, not symmetrically reversed, and it would certainly be no prettier a sight than we're seeing now.
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