John, that is the thought that keeps me happy when I turn to fatalism before an election. During much of the 2004 cycle it seemed John Kerry might win. And yet a Kerry victory would have been great for the GOP in the long run. As I watched Kerry fall into one trap after another, and make a national spectacle of campaign mismanagement, I realized that after a single Kerry term the Democrats might not be back in the White House for another generation. Only Ross Perot’s intervention in 1992 saved the Democrats from at least 16 straight years out of the White House after the Carter presidency.

I wrote a piece about 6 weeks before the ‘04 vote in which I reviewed all the ways in which Kerry was throwing away the election, and remembered another catastrophic display of sheer incompetence: that of the Russians and Austrians at the Battle of Austerlitz in 1805.