I was talking to my parents who live in Missouri. My mom is a loyal Democrat and voted for Kerry. My dad is a libertarian Republican swing voter who loves Al Franken but listens to Limbaugh-type radio because that's what's on the air in his area and voted for Bush because he thought simply changing presidents would cause an Al Qaeda attack.
One thing I found this weekend when talking to them is that, even though they read the newspaper (in my dad's case, several newspapers) a day and watch TV news all the time, they'd never heard about Kerry's successful efforts to shut down BCCI.
Shutting down BCCI is one of the best amazing things any member of Congress has ever done. I understand that Kerry might have been worried about reviving the Centrust controversy, but why on earth did the campaign do such a poor job of promoting his work on BCCI?
Similarly, why did the campaign and the Democratic Party do such a poor job of explaining Kerry's role in developing anti-money-laundering legislation and the children's health insurance program?
Similarly, the restoration of ties with Vietnam might be controversial, but that's a great story. Why did we hear so little about that kind of thing?
Maybe one reason Kerry did worse than a lot of Democrats in local races is partly due to the fact is that, even if they ended up not believing the Swift Boat Vermin, all they knew about the guy was that he was a Democrat, that he wasn't Bush and that he probably served bravely in Vietnam.
Personally, I live outside swing stateland, and the only commercial I saw talked about him being a soldier and a pilot, not about any of the stuff he accomplished.
It could be that what we Democrats need in 2006 and 2008 is not a sharp move to the left, or to the center, but just some kind of clear statement about what we believe and a better effort to present the presidential candidate's full biography, not just the section that tests bests in focus groups.