AMERICAN politics has come to resemble a never-ending episode of Dynasty. The current President is the son of a former President (and the grandson of a senator). His predecessor now serves as the political consort to a wife who is the Senator for New York. One of her colleagues and opponents in that chamber is a woman (Elizabeth Dole) who is married to the man (Robert Dole) who ran against Mr Clinton in the presidential contest eight years ago. America is fond of family businesses. This arrangement, though, looks positively incestuous.

It may be worse come the 2008 election. For the two big winners from this epic presidential battle, besides George W. Bush himself, are Hillary Clinton and Jeb Bush, the President’s brother and Governor of Florida. In a development that would make those who write soap opera scripts blush with shame, America may well be a mere 1,465 days away from a showdown between the Bush and Clinton tribes.

Mrs Clinton has proved how easy it is to win an election by losing one. Had John Kerry been elected, then any chance of her running for the White House in 2008 would have disappeared entirely. His pain is, without doubt, her gain. But the outcome is even more delicious for the senator. There had been real fears among her supporters that even if Mr Kerry lost, the seemingly charismatic Senator John Edwards would do well enough in the course of the campaign to establish himself as a serious rival to her.

As the contest evolved, it became obvious that Mr Edwards was not all that he had been cracked up to be. He did not outperform Dick Cheney in their one debate. His home state of North Carolina was easily captured by Mr Bush. The senate seat that he rashly chose to abandon was seized by the Republicans. Nice hair and teeth. No future.

And while Mrs Clinton will obviously have shed some tears for him, the defeat of the leader of the Democrats in the Senate, Tom Daschle in South Dakota, has not hurt her prospects either. He was a possible competitor in 2008 and certainly a rival for the limelight in Washington. His likely replacement as the Minority Leader, Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, will not even attempt to compete with her in the media.

The situation for Mr Bush (of Florida) is more complicated. He has made himself the darling of his party by delivering such a crucial state for his brother. There is not much doubt that his own local popularity helped the President. He has, nonetheless, been less than enthusiastic in the past about the idea of seeking the Oval Office. He once described the notion as something that only the Raelians (a notoriously weird cult) would consider. The dominant conservative branch of the Republicans does not, however, have an obvious attractive candidate for the 2008 ballot and would accept the Florida Governor if he made himself available. Provided that the President is reasonably popular with Republican activists at the end of his second term, the party nomination could well be there for the taking.

Another Bush-Clinton struggle four years hence would be an amazing spectacle. It sounds like the sort of competition that might occur in an unstable Latin American banana republic and not a superpower. And if either Mrs Clinton or Governor Bush were to win in 2008 and run again in 2012 it would create an astounding sequence. It would mean that by 2016 every American election since 1972 had involved the surname “Bush”, “Clinton” or “Dole” as either a presidential or vice-presidential candidate.

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