Let's talk about replacing GWBush in 2004.

Yeah, timber, some of those 20 year olds are also married with families.

This subtle distancing of Republicans from Bush has begun to show up, locally and nationally, even among those conservative politicians who spent this administration's first two years hugging the president as if their political future depended solely on the strength of their grip. Rep. Walter B. Jones Jr, (R-N.C.), Jacksonville's man in Congress, has joined other pro-military conservatives in stepping out of line with House leaders and criticizing the administration's policies towards veterans; Jones has said the administration treats vets like "second-class citizens." Conservative Rep. Zach Wamp (R-Tenn.) and Sen. George Voinovich (R-Ohio) led vocal Republican opposition to the administration's $87 billion supplemental spending bill for Iraq in September, a move which found conservative allies from Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchinson (R-Texas) to Sen. Sam Brownback (R-Kan.). House majority whip Roy Blount (R-Mo.) has taken the administration to task over its troop-rotation policies.

A similar mood is emerging in small, patriotic towns around the country. According to a study conducted in mid-October by Stars and Stripes, half of American soldiers in-country say their units have low morale, that they were insufficiently trained, and that they won't reenlist. The ubiquity of email in Iraq means that husbands, wives, families, and friends of these troops have a mainline to these gripes, and to the day-to-day grit and threat of combat, that they haven't had in previous wars. Holly Rossi, whose husband, Rob, an Army reserve engineer out of Londonderry, N.H., has watched the Family Support Group for his unit, wives who started the war as staunch pro-Bush patriots, come to doubt the political mission. "A lot of people feel tugged. We have built our lives around ... patriotism no matter what, but we're feeling very abandoned." Charles Carter, a retired Naval chief petty officer, told Knight Ridder: "I will vote non-Republican in a heartbeat if it continues as is."

"I guess that next thing we are going to hear is that the sailors told him to wear the flight suit and prance around on the aircraft carrier."

(I still haven't figured out what the acronym, Timberlandko, stands for. Any ideas?)

beginning with R Reagan, presidential elections have had far FAR more to do with personalities than with issues.