Presidential elections are like romances – the first heartbreak is always the worst.

Which probably accounts for the unusual number of e-mails I received last week from parents who mentioned that their voting-age children were crushed by John Kerry’s defeat.

Yep, that stung.

But I’ve been around long enough to develop a theory, and it has given me comfort in these dark post-election days. My Theory of Counter-Intuition goes like this: Often, when something seems certain, just the opposite occurs.

I first became eligible to vote in 1972, another election year in which young people were whipped up by a controversial war. Most supported George McGovern, the Democratic liberal in that race, the John Kerry of the 2004 contest. McGovern had been a war hero, but he was adamantly opposed to the war in Vietnam, which had bitterly divided the land.

Richard Nixon had run in 1968 on a platform that included ending the war in Vietnam with “peace and honor.” As it turned out, his plan actually involved considerably more fighting, dying and bombing, not to mention illegal incursions into nearby countries, then leaving without peace or honor. But that would would have made a lousy platform, so he didn’t mention it.

In 1972, Nixon portrayed McGovern – this will sound familiar – as a liberal outside the mainstream of American politics and too soft on military and political affairs. He accused McGovern of having a permissive attitude toward drug abuse (even as he swilled Scotch in the White House), while suggesting McGovern was unpatriotic for opposing the war.

Just a month before Election Day, Nixon announced that “peace was at hand” in Vietnam, even though we all later learned that it wasn’t. But Dick Nixon won handily, clobbering the idealistic McGovern 60.7 percent to 37.5 percent.

Now, if you are liberal still feeling sorry for yourself, pay attention here: Nixon won 520 electoral votes to McGovern’s 17. The war hero won only one state – Massachusetts. That’s right, the U.S., including Maine, was practically one giant “red state.”

Compared to McGovern’s defeat, Kerry’s narrow loss to a sitting incumbent was an impressive showing. Nixon really did have a mandate after that election. Again, by comparison, Bush has only eked out a squeaker.

If ever liberals had a reason to feel down it was in 1972. And did we ever.

If conservatives ever had a reason to crow, as they are doing today about a “permanent Republican majority,” it was 1972. I do, however, seem to recall Richard Nixon being more gracious about his victory than the current occupant of 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.

Enter my Theory of Counter-Intuition.

Just when people were writing books about the “Emerging Republican Majority,” which was an actual bestseller in the early 1970s, Nixon took a tumble. His dark, cynical, insular world came crashing down around his ears and he was forced from office two years after his election.

Interestingly, John Dean, one of Nixon’s appointees back then, has just published a book based upon the many parallels he sees between the Nixon and Bush administrations. Hmm…

Of course, I’m not predicting impeachment for George Bush. Watergate, as they used to say, was just a “two-bit burglary.” You might think that leading an entire nation into a war for phony and mistaken reasons, then completely failing to execute a winning strategy, should carry a comparable penalty. But we forget that in an extremist Republican Congress impeachment is reserved for more serious failings like lying about extramarital sex.

But Bush, like Nixon, may have planted the seeds of his own second-term undoing. He has muffed the opportunity to win the peace in Iraq by losing the battle for the hearts and minds of the people. Worse, the arrogance of his foreign policy has planted the bitter seeds of hate deep in hearts of millions of young Muslims around the world.

Valid January elections seem increasingly unlikely in Iraq, the insurgency is growing and the costs are mounting, both in dollars and, far more tragically, in American lives. Iraq, as Sen. Joe Biden has said, has simply become a short commute for killing Americans.

As we have seen, Bush is a stubborn ideologue incapable of admitting mistakes or changing course in the face of changing circumstances, a decidedly Nixonian combination of traits.

So, liberals, young and old, must have courage. Their duty in this democracy is the same as it was in 1972 – to oppose their nation’s headlong rush toward disaster.

Rhoades is executive editor of the Sun Journal. Readers should know that his opinions – like those of all columnists on these pages – are not intended to reflect those of the newspaper’s owners, employees or carriers. E-mail him at [email protected].