You can check it out at Washington Monthly, where Hilzoy flays Kevin Drum for saying that the cause of liberalism is better off under Obama than it was under Kerry. She takes this to mean that Drum is saying that the country is better off because Kerry lost, and uses SCOTUS and Katrina as examples. Of course, fighting the straw man is easier than confronting the actual argument.
Actually, I can forsee a scenario under which Drum is wrong (though I think he's right). Had Kerry gotten another 200k votes in Ohio and won his presidency would probably have been crippled out of the gate, especially when dealing with a GOP congress out for blood after being cheated out of the election by the framers (though not without a certain poetic justice). Kerry would have gotten bupkis done domestically, so he probably would have focused full-time on foreign policy. Had he turned things around in Iraq, he might well have sent the GOP into electoral oblivion. Kerry was preferred on domestic policy, to be sure. Foreign policy was his weakness.
Indeed, had Kerry surged in Iraq around 2005, I would imagine that most hawks would have supported the action. And then there's the little matter of the Anbar Awakening and Petraeus. The Awakening happened independent of Bush's Iraq policy, and Petraeus was really popular among pro-war Dems. Basically, had Kerry done in 2005 what Bush did in 2007 (back when it would have been more effective) he might well have become the most powerful president in recent memory. And he might well have ushered in a Democratic wave in 2006.
But one wonders whether this would have been good for the cause of liberalism anyway. If Kerry had gotten Iraq right, the Democratic Party would undoubtedly be more hawkish today. Rather than the Deaniac antiwar faction emerging the victor in the Dem internal battles, the Lieberman faction would have been transcendent. Ned Lamont would never have challenged Joe Lieberman in 2006. Barack Obama would have had a far more cloudy path to power. And Hillary Clinton would be the odds-on favorite to succeed Kerry in 2012. Provided, of course, that Kerry would have been smart enough to avoid the financial crisis.
