I don't remember that. I remember some who were opposed to the war worrying that an easy war over Saddam was part of the 2004 reelection campaign, but Google searches were unsuccessful.
But with the NYT archives open, we have gems like this where the loyal opposition argued that a victorious war would be no big deal by the 2004 election. Why? Because we'd have won long before the voters went to the polls:
One of the Democratic candidates who was booed in California last week, Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts, said today: ''In the first few days, America needs to band together and be supportive of the troops. This is not going to take very long, and if Howard -- I think anybody who knows anything about this knows there will be plenty of time to be critical.''
Though worried, some Democratic leaders predicted that the potential war with Iraq would ultimately have little effect on the outcome of Mr. Bush's re-election campaign.
''Let's remember that this war -- if there is a war -- is likely to be a distant memory by November of 2004,'' Gov. Gray Davis of California said.
''The dominant concern will be the economy and what has happened to individual Americans,'' he said.
This was the thinking on the eve of war. The dominant template for the Iraq War was still Desert Storm. Anybody who knew anything about that knew the pending war would be over fast, leaving plenty of time for political attacks closer to November 2004.
MINUTES LATER: And right after we captured Baghdad, the gloom of victory's impact set in:
The swift fall of Baghdad has complicated what many Democrats had already viewed as the difficult task of unseating President Bush and winning back Congress next year, party leaders say.
And it isn't like I can't take lumps with the way back machine. But with all the fiction of being lied into war over the objections of prescient anti-war stalwarts, it will be helpful to see how people really saw reality at the time.
