Drum 1 Norquist 0…Kevin is likely going to be too modest to post this, so I will. Looks like David Broder was flipping thru his old Washington Monthly collection, and came across our September 2004 issue, in which we asked a group of 16 smart political observers, Democratic and Republican, to predict what would happen if Bush were re-elected. As Broder writes in his Washington Post column today:

The one commentator who got it exactly right was Kevin Drum, who runs the magazine’s blog. “What do we have to look forward to if George W. Bush is elected to a second term?” he asked. “One word: scandal.”

Kevin based his argument, back then, on the “ruthlessness and disregard for political norms” that Bush and the GOP leadership had already demonstrated: holding open House votes, using off-year re-districting in Texas to gain House seats, and obsessively cloaking executive-branch decisions in a veil of secrecy.

And that turns out to have been exactly right. That combination of arrogance, secrecy, ruthlessness, and incompetence that Kevin picked up on during Bush’s first term is exactly what has driven the scandals that have emerged during his second.

It’s also instructive to look back at Grover Norquist’s prediction, headlined, “The Democratic Party is Toast.” Nice call.