All aboard!
The shape of events for the next few years is up for grabs, and it could follow the course you outlined. The idea of a Rightist candidate "climbing right over [W's] corpse" to gain the Presidency isn't so far-fetched--cannibalism is one chilling feature of the Rightist mentality. The first cusp is the 2006 election, and that's the one we have to think about first. We desperately need a Democratic Congress to begin to break the Republican chokehold on power.
So right now I'm timing the backlash, and working as best I can to see that the opposition has some opposition to give, besides a bunch of bitching. We've got to frame our own arguments, and that's going to take some good thinking, good speaking, and good writing, along with deciding just what stands we're going to take.
That's an excellent capsule summary of the game plan. The Left needs to rebuild its intellectual and philosophical base first, getting out from under the oppressive weight of Rightist framing, in order to formulate its own message with which to galvanize the activists and the voters. Everything else will flow from that.
It's clear to me that this won't happen from the DNC down; this is a grass-roots up movement. It has to be that way, because the Party apparatus is demoralized, decrepit and intellectually fossilized.
Power back to the People!