Kerry thought he was running against George W. Bush. But he wasn't. And because he ran against the wrong enemy, he lost.
Make no mistake about it, Kerry lost, regardless of what happened in Ohio. The only way for Kerry to win was to win big -- by at least 10% on the exit polls in the main battleground states -- to prove that he had a mandate for change and to make the election Diebold-proof. Mission NOT accomplished. While Democratic voters came out in record numbers, so did Republican voters, basically cancelling each other out.
So why did Kerry and the Democrats lose?
The fact of the matter is that Kerry lost because he did not understand the enemy. He tried running a political campaign against an opponent, George W. Bush, but his opponent wasn't George W. Bush. His opponent was an alternative reality where Kerry was a war shirker rather than a war hero, where Kerry was a big-spender rather than a spending cutter, where Kerry was weak on terrorism rather than being one of the most effective people in the Senate when it came to fighting terrorism. His opponent was, in the end, a large propaganda network putting out soothing lies for a willfully ignorant public, rather than George W. Bush. He ran against George W. Bush, and he lost -- because, just as Saddam had nothing to do with 9/11, George W. Bush had nothing to do with the forces that have brought Republican extremists to power in the United States. He went after the wrong opponent, and as a result, is going to be getting to do a lot of windsurfing and snowboarding in the future.
Liberals in general believe that there is an objective truth, consisting of facts. The Party knows better. The Party knows that, for most people, truth is what the Party tells them, through the Party-controlled media and the trickle-down words over office coolers of the official Party commissars such as Bill O'Reilly, Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, etc., soothing lies that they want to believe, and thus do. As long as the Democrats maintain allegience to little things like "truth" and "facts", they cannot win. Lies will always win over truth, because lies are what we really, in our heart of hearts, want to hear. We WANT to hear that we went into Iraq for righteous reasons and are winning. We WANT to hear that opponents of that Iraq policy are un-American. We WANT those cool, soothing lies. Until the Democrats realize that they are not running against a candidate, they are running against an alternative reality that the Republicans carefully present to the people, they cannot win.
- Badtux the Reality-based Penguin