HERE'S ED KILGORE, making an important point about politics as it's played in the real world.

Some Arabs came over here and killed a lot of Americans. Bush went over there and killed a lot more Arabs. Since then, no Arabs have come over here and killed Americans. Thus, Bush's invasion of Iraq is responsible for our safety since 9/11.

I don't know about you, but in conversations with non-political people during the 2004 campaign, I heard some version of this "Bush must be doing something right" argument repeated over and over again. And in my experience, telling people they are falling prey to the post hoc ergo propter hoc (after this, therefore because of this) logical fallacy is not a terribly effective rebuttal.

Republicans understood this dynamic, which is why the Bush-Cheney campaign did not dwell on back-and-forth arguments about the original rationales for the war, or respond to John Kerry's pointed criticisms of the administration's success in fighting terrorism. Their whole message was that George W. Bush's characteristic resolve and decisiveness had intimidated terrorists into inaction, making him the Indispensible Man in the war on terror.

Yep. As the only two-term Democratic president since FDR could tell you, winning campaigns don't try to change the underlying assumptions of the electorate in a matter of a few short months; they use those assumptions to frame the debate in a way that ultimately persuades a plurality of the voters to pull the lever by their guy's name.

Sooner or later, we Democrats are going to remember that. And when we do, I suspect that we're going to find that the GOP is in the same kind of trouble at the presidential level that we were in for so many years. It's hard for a majority party to consistently win the White House -- especially once the minority party grows up, and quits making their job easier than it should be.