I am anatomically ill-equipped to venture much into the Right blogosphere (a weak bladder, and a spleen too easly depleted), but occasionally take a stroll over to more "centrist technocrat" sites like that of Matt Yglesias, just to peek over the fence at the sensible people next door. They have an interesting discussion going on over there about how the war in Iraq is likely to effect the upcoming Presidential elections ( Is National Security a Loser?). Of course, the discussion wasn't nearly shrill enough to do this topic justice...
The electoral effect of hawkishness vs dovishness during and after Vietnam, until the Berlin Wall fell, was much more stable, and tilted in favor of hawkishness, for structural reasons that no longer apply. This was because the Cold War had become incontrovertibly bipartisan more than a decade before the big escalation of 1965-8 in Vietnam. Democrats who opposed the war had to overcome the perception of being feckless and opportunistic for abandoning a consensus they had agreed to at the outset of the Vietnam escalation, and even more fundamentally, earlier when the struggle against Communism became bipartisan. Even insofar as the doves seemed to have a pragmatic point about the war going so badly in Vietnam as to be unwinnable, the wider context of the Cold War served to make any local, tactical, concessions to reality foolish in the wider, strategic setting. Can't let that first domino fall no matter how hard it might be to keep it propped up, because its fall will simply make later struggles against the same worldwide Communist menace even harder.
Of course we're hearing the hawks on Iraq try to invoke the same arguments for this war. It doesn't seem to be working thus far, which should not be surprising. You just have to set up the parallel arguments to see how farfetched, and, more importantly, so far from any consensus shared widely and by both parties, they are. The hawks in this war can talk all they want about Iraq's status as the domino we can't let fall, lest the re-establishment of a caliphate in Baghdad lead to a Muslim re-Reconquista of "Andaluz", but all except the lunatic fringe recognize that as crazy talk. This is much more objectively crazy than the admittedly exaggerated fear that Red Army tanks would be in Paris if NATO weren't resolute enough. But, much more importantly, fear of the Red Army marching into Paris was clearly a folie a deux, bought into by both parties. Ho Chi Minh was clearly a Communist, and clearly receiving massive support from the leaders of the international Communist conspiracy, China and the USSR. Of course the hawks in this war have had to make the mutatis mutandis claims about Saddam's place in the worldwide radical Islamist conspiracy of terror. Except, of course, Saddam demonstrably had no such place, was, in fact, one of al Qaeda's biggest enemies.
Without a prior agreed bipartisan worldview putting this war into a wider context, success or failure of the war itself is free to determine its effects on how people vote. That, by itself, makes the part the war will play in Election 2008 much more volatile and unpredictable, though somewhat less so if you're confident in your predictions about how the war will go between now and then. Since any sensible view of the war doesn't give good odds of the war going very well anytime soon, advantage would seem most likely to be with the Dems from this issue in 2008.
But the real political destabilizer in the current war, is that the absence of a bipartisan, mutually agreed, worldview about this war, leaves both sides open to potentially devastating attacks from the other party.
The Republicans have already pretty much shot their wad on accusing the Dems of treasonably undermining the struggle against the supposedly existential threat we were under from Saddam's Iraq. But this just makes clear that what they need is a better adversary if their strategy of scaring the bejeesus out of the electoratre is to work. The Iraqi insurgency has been woefully inadequate in that respect, killing our soldiers instead of our civilians. This is why the Republicans so desparetly need a war with Iran, or more to the point, why they need the second 9/11 that only Iran, of all the potential targets of US aggression, would seem capable of delivering. Let Iran kill a few hundred Americans, and, no matter how many Iranians we had to kill to get them to retaliate in this way, the Republicans can get back to depicitng the Dems as treasonably unwilling to kill as many Iranians as the Republicans think we should to protect this great country of ours from..., well, if enough American civilians are killed, the electorate will not be thinking that closely about means and ends. If this strategy works, as in, gets a second 9/11 that isn't too obviously a result of the administration's incompetence, the result could be a Republican blowout in 2008. What makes it so attractive as a strategy though, is that there don't seem to be any viable less desparate strategies out there, that might deliver less than a blowout, but at least a marginal victory.
The Dems are congenitally less inclined to either go for the jugular, or for a Hail Mary Pass. Even if they were inclined to the offensive, this cycle looks favorable to them anyway to stay on the defensive, just sitting back and letting the Republicans lose the election by themselves on the weakness of a failing Iraq War. But the outline of an attack strategy for them is pretty clear. They could contend that the Republicans sought out this otherwise senseless war precisely in order to have some war going allowing them to deploy their patented anti-Democratic attack strategy of accusing us of hating America because we aren't as willing as they are to shoot first and never get around to asking questions. This strategy, if successful, also promises a blowout in 2008, or maybe even a Democratic President sooner, after Bush and Cheney are convicted in the Senate.
It really gets hairy when you consider the interplay of these strategies in a matrix with their payoffs. Going for the other side's jugular may quickly establish itself as the dominant strategy for both sides, because an ongoing war that lacks a pre-agreed bipartisan narrative simply leaves both sides no choice but to create their own narratives identifying the other side as the Bad Guys. Someone will have to be blamed for the fiasco, and if it isn't Them, it will inevitably be Us, so we better make sure it's Them.
The 2008 election, if there even is one, promises to be among our nation's most volatile, and all because of this war. It would be early even in a normal election cycle to tote up the probable electoral effects of even normal factors. This won't be a normal cycle, and the War in Iraq isn't a nomral factor.