Democrat spin-meisters are playing fantasy football, trying to argue that Schwarzenegger’s win is bad for Bush.

It is certainly possible that, as some have suggested, it would have been better for Bush to go into the 2004 election with a hated Democrat in charge of California. Perhaps it would have turned CA voters against the Dems, and enough of them might have voted Bush to push the state into his column. Or maybe, as Howard Dean and others have argued, it was a generic “anti-incumbent” vote, which will turn against Bush in 2004. The converse of both of these arguments is at least as plausible, however: maybe having a competent Republican at the helm will turn CA voters into GOP supporters… or maybe the anti-Davis vote wasn’t so much anti-incumbent as anti-Democrat or anti-sleazebag.

But all of this back-and-forth reasoning is irrelevant to the Democrats’ analysis. To take the Dems at their word, one would have to imagine that, if Schwarzy had LOST the recall vote, they would have been saying: gee, this pro-incumbent vote is good for Bush.

Yeah, right.

We would have been hearing about “a huge win for the Democratic party”, “this vote was a referendum on George W. Bush”, “California rejects the failed Bush economy” etc etc.

Instead, they have to try to spin a loss into a win.