Fineman: Blast will reverberate in campaign (calls it tipping point)

[RamboLiberal]

http://www.msnbc.com/news/955004.asp?0cv=CB20

Mark the day: The blast that rocked the U.N. headquarters in Baghdad was more than a massacre of innocents. It also was a tipping point in American politics.

NOW WE KNOW for certain that the 2004 election will be, virtually to the exclusion of anything else, a referendum on President Bush’s decision to go Iraq — and a debate over whether doing so made us safer, or put us in greater danger, in the war on global terrorism.

For the White House, this is a case of “be careful what you wish for.” As was made clear on the deck of the Abe Lincoln, they want to run Bush for re-election as the Man in the Flight Suit. But now it’s not clear whether that garment was a coronation robe or a straitjacket.

--snip--

Another sure thing: Wes Clark is in. The retired general and Rhodes Scholar increasingly looks like a seer for his pre-war comments. Go back and read what he had to say in the months leading up to the invasion of Iraq. (Any of the Clark for President grassroots Web sites will do.) Clark, who was leaning toward running in any case, almost certainly can’t now resist the chance to say “I told you so.” And, more than any other possible Democratic candidate (with the exception of John Kerry), Clark could brush off the soft-on-defense rhetoric that GOP oppo experts are preparing to throw at the Democratic Party.