A subtext to this year’s presidential campaign is the intense anger that many Democrats are directing toward Bush, an attitude that has been growing in recent months.

“I’ve never seen anything like it,” says Ted Jelen, a political science professor at the University of Nevada at Las Vegas. “There are people who just really, really hate this person.”

Fully a quarter of Americans – mostly Democrats – tell pollsters they have a very unfavorable opinion of the president, more than double the number from last April. When only Democrats are polled, more than half report they feel that way. —Washington Post

Maybe this, rather than Nader’s entry into the race, represents the real danger for the Democratic campaign, in several senses. First, because anger provokes a backlash, and there are none better at lashing back than the current crop of Republican dirty-tricksters.

Anger is not necessarily a productive emotion when it comes to politics. The anger against Bill Clinton was so fierce and over the top that it helped him in 1996 and then again during the impeachment in 1998. People got more angry at those yelling at the president than at the president himself.

— Republican Pollster Frank Luntz

Second, this apparent gift the Democrats are being handed can derail the focus of the campaign. The common wisdom is that a growing base of disaffection with Bush might make the campaign complacent, when what they ought to be doing is reaching out for the moderate swing voters. This position is amply argued today over at BillMon’s. I see that suggestion, however, as possibly even more dangerous. I have long argued that the best way to defeat Bush is not with an insipid least-common-denominator platform but a bold and well-defined progressive and populist one. It is arguable that Gore lost alot of votes in 2000 because he reinvented himself every week in response to the pollsters’ latest advice on what the public wanted. A chameleonic moving target of a candidate may be the last thing the swing voters potentially fed up with Bush need. Especially if the candidate turns out to be Kerry and the Republican innuendo is all about him being a weirdo Massachusetts liberal, the Democratic campaign ought to be in no small part about the reclamation of that L-word and, as Joseph Duemer points out, who gets to control the meaning of the Vietnam myth.