Nicholas Kristof's piece in today's NYTimes

[Michael Eisenstadt]

Be Careful What You Ask For
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF


Republicans are really in a pickle now.

No, it's true. Just consider the picture in the fall of 2004 as
President Bush battles to hold onto Congress and his own house:

• The new Scalia Supreme Court has accepted an abortion case that could
overturn Roe v. Wade and abortion rights in America. The federal budget
deficit has hit $400 billion, and the expanded 2003 tax cuts mean that
the federal debt is out of control. This has kept the Dow below 7,000.

• The '02 election has emboldened conservatives to take hard-line
positions and overshoot their mandate, just as they did under Newt
Gingrich in 1994, so that more high school students now learn about
creationism than about condoms. The result, once again, is rising public
anger at right-wing ideologues.

• In response to huge budget deficits, states have had to slash school
spending. Test scores are dropping, and a growing number of children are
being left behind. Even centrists are angered by logging of old-growth
forests and the administration's fervent push to drill for oil in the
Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

• The occupation of Iraq is increasingly unpopular at home, with an
average of one American killed there every two weeks and Iran gaining
influence in the anarchic south. The catastrophic failure to engage
North Korea has led that country to start up its Yongbyon reactor, churn
out many nuclear weapons and test its new three-stage Taepodong 2
missile, which can reach New York.

The above paragraphs will self-destruct next year, well before they
could embarrass me by being juxtaposed with reality. As Mark Twain said,
the art of prophecy is difficult, especially with regard to the future.
But it does seem plausible that Republicans will overinterpret their
mandate (if 22,000 votes had gone differently, the Senate could have
remained Democratic in January). 

President Bush is, like President Reagan but unlike his father, a
natural leader who is unafraid to use political capital and even borrow
some from the bank. If he pushed an aggressive platform before, with a
minority of the popular vote and a divided Congress, imagine what he'll
seek now. Already the Republicans are oozing hubris.

(You can't much blame them. As David Letterman observed about the
Democrats, You know you're in trouble when your bright young star of the
future is Frank Lautenberg.)

Yet the reality is that this will be an excruciating economic climate in
which to govern. New York State alone will face a $6 billion shortfall
next year, and war spending and tax cuts could easily push the federal
deficit to between $200 billion and $400 billion in 2004, up to a
precarious 4 percent of G.N.P. Services and school programs around the
country will be cut, and voters will find someone to blame in two years'
time. The Democrats, out of power, won't make a convenient whipping boy.

John Ellis, a Bush cousin and longtime conservative political analyst,
gets it exactly right on his Weblog: "The 2002 result is a strong vote
of confidence for the Bush administration. It is not a mandate. The
great danger that now looms for the G.O.P. is that it will mistake the
vote of confidence for a mandate."

In his press conference yesterday, Mr. Bush gave no sign he is
intoxicated by election vapors; even when goaded by reporters looking
for a good story, he didn't speak dreamily about appointing John
Ashcroft to the Supreme Court, drilling for oil in Yellowstone or
exiling liberals to Guantánamo. The key test, though, will be in the
coming weeks as we see whether he reads the soon-to-be-passed U.N.
resolution on Iraq the same way everyone else does.

Mr. Bush's problem is that he has launched a diplomatic process in which
he has little faith. The reality is that he went to the U.N. to get
international legitimacy, not weapons inspections. So he may soon be
tempted to short-circuit the diplomatic process.

The resolution, as it is presently drafted, requires Saddam Hussein to
make a full declaration of his secret programs within 30 days. It's a
good bet that there'll be a lot of doubt that his declaration is
completely truthful, and so hawks will encourage Mr. Bush to launch a
war at that time. They will urge him to announce that the declaration is
false and constitutes a "material breach" — and then send the bombers.

If that happens, we could be at war by year's end. We might be paying
for such hubris for years to come.