Brad DeLong has a good post on our defeat
and
Josh Marshall's even better
I agree with Brad DeLong. The problem isn't the Democrats' message. I think the uphill battle really happens when you are running against an incumbent president who has come immediately after a president from the other party. In the 20th Century, the only president whose predecessor was of a different party to lose reelection was Jimmy Carter, who lost under exceptionally poor economic and foreign policy circumstances.
I think it's correct that Bush is thoroughly incompetant. But that was offset by the fact that we have a television media, which is anti-Democratic and pro-Bush. There were three pro-Bush-biased media events which, I think, sealed the election for Bush:
- Swiftboat Veterans for Truth came out and smeared John Kerry. These guys were thorough liars and obviously an arm of the Bush campaign. The TV media, with a few exceptions, gave an even-handed report even though these guys were complete liars, thereby creating the impression that their side had some validity. Kerry's national polls plummeted from a lead around August 20 to a tie on September 1.
- The Republican National Convention happened at the beginning of September, in which they exploited and exploited New York City's tragedy on September 11th in order to get support from the rest of the country. The media was thoroughly uncritical of this, in stark contrast to the DNC.
- Kerry's Mary Cheney comment (as well as that by John Edwards) was obviously meant to be nice comment to encourage tolerance in the debate on gay rights. No one can argue that the TV press did not take Lynn Cheney and the Bush campaign's side in that one. They did not leave open any possibility that Kerry had good intentions and they parotted the Bush-Cheney line that he was "talking about someone else's kid."
I say that these three events were pivotal because Kerry's polls unambiguously dropped when each of these events occurred:
http://www.pkarchive.org/image004.gif
More importantly is what didn't happen. That is, substantial coverage of Bush's lies on the war on terror, Iraq, and his economic policy, which is far more important substantively than the media events described above.
BTW, if you're conservative and disagree with my above characterizations, you can interpret the swifties as virtuous, the RNC convention as wonderful, and the Mary Cheney comment as ill-intentioned. In that case, you can interpret my comments this way: The arrival of the Swiftboat veterans for truth, the RNC convention, and the Mary Cheney commment were all events associated with large drops in Kerry's polling numbers.
Personally, I think that Democrats need to discuss and, more importantly, act in terms of changing media coverage of their candidates in order to prevent future election losses. We do not need to change our policy or our policy message. It is media coverage that we need to change.