A WHILE BACK, I wrote this:

I think it’s fair to say that if Kerry wins, he’ll win based on anti-Bush sentiment among Democrats and swing voters. But although the anybody-but-Bush vote might be good enough to get him into office, once he’s elected it will evaporate: the dump-Bush voters will have gotten what they wanted, and they won’t have any special reason to support any particular policy of Kerry’s — or even Kerry himself. . . .

So Kerry might find himself elected, but with support that rapidly fades away, leaving him subject to Washington crosswinds and a slave to his party’s interest groups. That’s pretty much what happened to President Jimmy Carter. He owed his election to backlash over Gerald Ford’s pardon of Richard Nixon, and the lingering residue of Watergate. But that turned out to be an insufficient base on which to govern. Carter’s own party (especially, though not only, rivals like Ted Kennedy) cut him to ribbons. We lost ground both at home and abroad as a result.

This week, The Economist wrote (via Prof. Bainbridge):

Because the election is largely a referendum on Mr Bush, he can claim, if he wins, a clear mandate for his policies—particularly cutting taxes at home and smiting terrorists abroad. If Mr Kerry wins, the only mandate he will have will be for not being George Bush. In 1993, Mr Clinton had a difficult enough time holding his party together despite laying out a compelling vision of a new Democratic Party. The singularly unvisionary Mr Kerry will have to deal not just with the same struggles (for instance, between health-care reformers and deficit hawks) but also with a new civil war between the party’s rabid Michael Moore faction and its more sensible Tony Blair wing.

Advantage: GlennReynolds.com!

UPDATE: Great minds think alike. Matt Welch, who probably never read the GlennReynolds.com post above, wrote this at the close of the DNC:

I can’t begin to fathom how that lack of specificity might play to the sliver of a minority of swing-state voters who haven’t already made up their minds. Maybe they just needed to know that John Kerry was 6’4″, served in Vietnam, and never much liked commies. Whatever the efficacy, this anti-Bush unity is almost certain to dwindle if and when the Dark Lord is dethroned, and I’ll bet the hot political story in 2006 and 2008 will be about how the governing coalition is in disarray while the Republicans are newly unified against the haughty, chin-secreting liberal. This may be deeply unsatisfying to my tiny and incoherent demographic of non-partisan internationalist free-market Bush opponents, but within this projected disunity lies a silver lining — if John Kerry presides over a divided government, backed by a bickering party that doesn’t have George Bush to kick around anymore, then we will see endless new variations on the concept of “gridlock.” Aside from not being slaughtered by Islamicist madmen, this may be the best thing we can hope for.

Well, that not-being-slaughtered bit is pretty high on my list, and it strikes me as Kerry’s big weak point.