Kerry Lets It Slip.... The Democrats' Dream

So this is the Democrats' long-term goal. To replicate Watergate and gain revenge for Clinton's take down.

The Hill reports:

Kerry Links Retaking House To Bush Impeachment

MA. Sen. John Kerry said last night that if Dems retake the House, there's a "solid case" to bring "articles of impeachment" against President Bush for allegedly misleading the country about pre-war intelligence, according to several Dems who attended.

Kerry was speaking at a holiday party for alumni of his WH '04 bid.

About 100 campaign vets gathered at Finn McCool's bar in D.C. to hear him. In a short speech, Kerry praised Dems who were working on Senate and House campaigns, and then said, according to one listener: "If we take back the House, there's a solid case to bring articles of impeachment against this president." Another listener heard a slight variation: "If we win back the House, I think we have a pretty solid case to bring articles of impeachment against this President." Kerry then quickly added, according to several in the audience, "Don't tell anyone I said that."

Read it here.

To be fair, Kerry may have been joking, as some of his aides claim. But Bush was obviously joking when he made the "bomb al Jazeera" comments [in private] and he is still being raked over the coals for that one. So let's see where this takes us.

The Democrats have only had two big electoral successes in the past half century. One came right after JFK's assassination, and was obviously due to the wave of emotion that engendered. That one would be hard to replicate, not that there aren't a lot of Kennedys out there to knock off, but there seems to be a diminishing payoff in doing so. And anyway, first you have to get the Kennedy into the White House, and that is an increasingly hard row to hoe.

So that leaves the other big Democrat victory -- Watergate. That one has obsessed Dems for a generation now. Every time a Republican claims the White House, they work their little butts off trying to generate a scandal of similar proportions. But again, the payoffs seem to decline over time. And, it is really hard to pump up a scandal to Watergate proportions when the Republicans control Congress.

Hence Kerry's remarks. They make sense in terms of the Democrats' long term strategy to take back the government.

1) Create a scandal that will bring down Republican congressional leaders and generate enough repulsion in the electorate to drive moderates out of the process while simultaneously demoralizing Republicans and energizing your base. This, they hope, will give them control of at least one of the houses of Congress.

2) Use Congress to generate a full-scale Watergate-style assault on Bush, then sit back and watch the votes roll in.

Well, at least that's the dream....

Maybe Kerry is just a dreamer.

Instapundit notes that comments like this will be counterproductive for Democrats because they will energize the Republican base.