What do they say about history repeats? With four weeks left before the General Election of 2008, it’s important to plan forward, but also to look back.

In the last few weeks of the 2004 campaign while the Democratic party was locked in an internal struggle over whether to pitch to right or left, George W. Bush did everything at once. For the affluent (and those aspiring to affluence) there were promises of more deregulation and tax cuts. Voters earning over $100,000 a year turned out in record numbers in response. For single issue theocratic types, there was stir-it-up talk about preserving straight white patriarchal elites. They turned out too.

For everyone else, drowning in a war economy and hurting for lack of a safety net, W offered an appeal to primal instinct. At the level of advertising, tv and talk radio, the presidential race shrank to just one question: Who do you Trust? John Kerry – the flip flopper “girlie” man – or Bush, the-with-me-or-against me wartime president?

In this election like that one, the Right’s ground troops were fed plenty of rhetoric. But Rove didn’t rely on red meat alone. There was also cash. We’ve learned a lot about how GOP political operatives led by Rove politicized every tentacle of the federal government from the Defense Department to Justice. So it should come as no surprise to recall that in the weeks before the '04 election, Bush administration officials dispersed a mountain of government largesse in swing states. In September and October of 2004, the administration announced $10 million for a church based job training scheme in Jacksonville Florida, money for a long-awaited wildlife refuge in Minnesota and a national park in Colorado. $207 million went to clean up drinking water in Columbus Ohio.

Even a government in overdraft had money for pre-election favors in ’04. This year, it seems to me, there’s $850 billion to dole out. We’ve been told the money could start being dispersed at any moment. Call me crazy, but it seems to me, with a bill that’s packed with more than $100 billion in corporate and personal tax breaks, for among others the auto racing body NASCAR, someone better be keeping a tight eye on those dispersements. Pork may be the least of our worries. History suggests we should watch for buying votes.