Kerry Spot    [ jim geraghty reporting ]
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Kerry and media members, aboard the candidate's plane, June 22, 2004.

E. J. Dionne Jr. forecasts a "political tidal wave" wiping out Republicans this year:

Rep. Jay Inslee knows about political tidal waves... Now what he's seeing "is the same tidal wave moving in the opposite direction.... There's a passion out there." And the passion, Inslee says, is running against George W. Bush.

....I sense the same passion Inslee does on the anti-Bush side.

Even if the plural of anecdote is not data, the anecdotes are about citizens who avoided politics for years but are now devoting time to John Kerry's campaign out of hostility to Bush. Individuals who never before made a campaign contribution are opening their checkbooks to Kerry and the Democrats. (This is more than anecdotal; it's reflected in Kerry's record fundraising.) And, perhaps most significant, moderate and moderately conservative Republicans are showing little enthusiasm for Bush, reflecting their worries about his Iraq policy and their qualms over large deficits.

"I've never seen a time with so many Republicans expressing consternation about their party and a willingness to support the other party," said Rep. Brian Baird, a Democrat whose district, in Washington's southwest corner, went for Bush four years ago.

While we can quibble with Dionne's fascinating choice of a Democratic congressman as a objective, disinterested source to back up that assertion about unenthusiastic Republicans, the nation's Left wing does seem to be boiling over with emotion lately.

In just the past weeks, liberal rage has manifested itself in the hype around Michael Moore's movie, Air America. Al Gore calling Bush's allies "digital brown shirts," Paul Krugman constant allegations of GOP corruption in every column, a new book featuring a character fantasizing about the assassination of George W. Bush, and a column by Andrew Greeley comparing Bush to Hitler.

But anecdotes about emotion are not a very good indicator of electoral success. In fact, history suggests that an angry party can create an echo-chamber effect, concluding that everyone feels the same strong feelings it does, and overestimating its support among the electorate.

Peggy Noonan attributes the term "broken glass Republicans" to 2000, but I believe it was first used widely in 1998, to describe GOP voters who wanted to punish Clinton for embarrassing the nation with the Lewinsky scandal. At least one pundit joked that anti-Clinton voters would brave sniper fire to get a chance to pull a lever against the president.

For much of the fall of 1998, the conventional wisdom was that the Lewinsky scandal would skew results by depressing voter turnout among Democrats and energizing the Republican faithful. A pre-election race-by-race survey by the Associated Press indicated that GOP gains in the House "would range from single digits to perhaps 20 seats, depending on the outcome of a slew of close races across the country. In the Senate, Republican dreams of a net gain of five seats, which would have brought the GOP's strength to 60, appear to have faded."

Pollster Celinda Lake said, "Democratic voters, demoralized by President Clinton's problems and seeing little incentive to vote for politicians and a system teetering on the brink of moral bankruptcy, may choose to stay home on Nov. 3 while Republicans may turn out at average or higher than average levels to help cure the moral ills of politics."

But while the Republicans had emotion, they didn't have enough for a majority. Anger can be invigorating, but it can also be blinding. Back in 1998, Republicans weren't doing much to win over moderates or independents, their sense of their popularity perhaps skewed by their own angry echo chamber: Rush Limbaugh's radio program, the Wall Street Journal editorial page, the then-burgeoning NRO, etc. On Election Day, the GOP's get-out-the-vote efforts were revealed to be miles behind unions and African-American churches. Result? Democrats did far better than expected.

In fact, one doesn't have to look back all the way to 1998 to recall a case of enthusiastic supporters not translating into actual votes. Just look at Howard Dean. Enthusiasm? Sure. Lots of positive media coverage? Sure. Meetups, online donations, house parties, volunteers — by almost every standard, Dean had by far the most passionate and fired-up group of supporters.

But by the time the Iowa caucuses rolled around, the Deaniacs had proven too fired up, too angry, too emotional to persuade a majority of their fellow Democrats that their man was the best choice. By the time of the "Dean scream," most of the party decided that they wanted someone to make similar arguments in a less-emotional manner.

Blogger and law professor Ann Althouse wrote about the phenomenon of preaching to the converted:

I think that style of argument (like the Moore style of documentary) appeals to people who are already committed to your side and makes other people not want to listen to you at all. People interested in rational arguments will choose not to engage with you, which you might wrongly read as agreement, leading you to become complacent about the correctness and persuasiveness of your beliefs. But you miss the opportunity to persuade people who don't already agree and you lose touch with how they think about things. You may wind up thinking that people who don't agree with you must be ignorant or ill-willed. Now you're in the end stage where you're calling people stupid and fascist.

In fact, if I were a Kerry strategist or a Democratic party guru, I might be a little worried about the raw fury boiling over. While polls have shown Americans are worried about progress in Iraq, have lingering concerns about the economy, and aren't always impressed with President Bush, they just don't hate him. By and large they trust him, they like him, and think of him as a strong leader.

Are those potential Democratic voters really going to be persuaded by the bile, the spittle-emitting rants, the snarling, the tantrums, the ludicrously over-the-top charges? Do fence-sitters get spurred by those who compare Zarkawi to George Washington? Or, like in 1998, do they shift to the party that seems calm, rational, and focused on the future?

One other thought: It's late June. We still have four months to go. Just how much more intense can Democratic fury get? Burning Bush in effigy? Al Franken's bestseller, Die, Republicans, Die? Al Gore's "Everyone who disagrees with me is a Nazi" speech? Krugman not only calling for Bush's impeachment, but his imprisonment in Abu Ghraib?

How long until the Democratic party as a whole bursts with a cathartic Dean scream?