In her book, The Guns of August, historian Barbara Tuchman, told the story of how, seemingly against its collective will, Europe moved inexorably toward World War 1. At one point, she recounted a conversation between an ex-chancellor of Germany and his successor. “How did it all happen?” the first man asked incredulously. “Ach,” said his successor, “if we only knew.”

One can’t help but wonder if, come January 20, 2009, Democrats won’t be engaging in similar dazed discussions about how they lost a clear shot at the White House.

Increasingly, it appears to me that the party that enjoyed the prospect of almost certain victory in this year’s presidential election is flirting with defeat. The once-presumptive nominee, Hillary Clinton, is, through a scorched-earth strategy, burying herself beneath a daunting disapproval rating that, should she miraculously be nominated, would almost certainly scuttle her chances in November. Meanwhile, the candidate in the lead, Barack Obama, seems unable to finish Clinton off, weighed down by his own uncertain handling of the Jeremiah Wright affair, constant sniping from the Clinton camp, and the growing perception of him as a conventional pandering pol.

A new Democratic coalition seemed to be aborning as 2008 dawned. But the campaign between Clinton and Obama has become so bitter that polling now indicates there are substantial numbers of supporters of each candidate who will be loathe to support the other should their preferred candidate not be nominated.

That wouldn’t have been the case just a few weeks ago. But the longer this fight goes on, the more hardened folks with strong allegiances become. At present, it’s hard to imagine core supporters of either Obama or Clinton voting for McCain. But it’s easy to picture them sitting on their hands, easier to picture in fact, with each passing day.

So, how did things get this way? How is it that polling shows that John McCain is running even or better against either of the two potential Democratic standard bearers? With the economy in recession, even by McCain’s reckoning, and an unpopular war going on, how is it that the Democrats stand on the brink of losing in November?

“Ach, if we only knew.”

Above all, I suspect that Democrats have gotten themselves to this place because of the triumph of celebrity over credentials. Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton are both intelligent people. But it cannot be argued that they were, in any way, the most qualified candidates for the presidency running for the Democratic nomination this year. While I think that Obama, owing to his time as a community organizer and state senator before his election to the US Senate in 2004, can credibly argue that he has more relevant experience than Senator Clinton has, neither candidate had the credentials to commend them to the presidency.

History abhors vacuums. So do public perceptions. Clinton and Obama, each for different reasons, were two candidates ripe for being saddled with negatives because the perceptions of them were largely vacuums waiting to be filled.

What Clinton lacked in credentials, she had in both celebrity and negative opinions. Clinton may enjoy 70% support among traditional Democrats. But she is disliked by much of the rest of the electorate. Many distrust her, a tribe that has only grown through the course of the campaign. Many women I know disdain her as a woman who either weakly countenanced a serial adulterer for a husband or put up with him for purely political reasons; either way, as one woman told me last week, “The presidency shouldn’t be the country’s consolation prize for a person who demonstrates consistently bad judgment.”

Obama has become a tabula rasa, first for those wanting to imbue him with their fondest aspirations and more recently, for the constant assaults of the Clinton campaign and Republican functionaries.

Joe Biden, Christopher Dodd, and Bill Richardson–you remember them, don’t you?–are no celebrities. Nor are they without their faults. But they were already vetted before the 2008 campaign began. And they had credentials. They would have been far more daunting candidates to tangle with McCain than either Clinton or Obama are likely to prove to be. None of them would be as damaged by now had they become the three finalists in the nomination fight.

The fact that the three least qualified candidates for president were the finalists for the Democrats–I’m counting John Edwards–tells me that Democrats, donors even more than rank-and-file voters, were taking 2008 too much for granted. They dismissed the need to put forward a seriously-credentialed candidate for the presidency. They bet that the celebrity of a former First Lady or a first-term Senator with an undeniable gift for oratory were all they needed, making a choice much like the nineteenth century Whigs who nominated war heroes like William Henry Harrison and Zachary Taylor, people with big names but little public record. Democrats apparently thought that they could put forward a nominee who made them tingle, qualifications be hanged.

None of this is to say that either Obama or Clinton can’t win in November. The political lay of the land still favors the Democratic nominee. But with each passing day of this depressing campaign, their prospects are hurt.

That might not have been the case had those voters in Iowa and New Hampshire said to themselves, “I like Obama and Clinton, but I want to win with a known quantity on whom new baggage is unlikely to be placed.”

I can’t help wondering if committed Democrats won’t be asking each other as they watch President McCain’s Inaugural Address next January, “Ach, why didn’t I vote for Biden?”

[Mark Daniels’s personal blog can be found here.]