We will now be inundated with hundreds of different opinions on what went wrong, how we should respond, etc. and most of them will probably be wrong.
The Deanite wing will say that Democrats need to go more left and appeal to the base - but were the base unmotivated? Did any major Democratic constituencies stay home? Was there a significant Nader factor? It doesn't appear so.
Conservatives will say the Democrats were too far left - which is also nuts. Kerry and Bush's Iraq plans, for instance. really weren't much different. Democrats have tried to suck up to the center over the last decade, and it doesn't work.
We lost, and it was not due to a lack of either effort or strategy. I think it was simply bad fortune. There simply hasn't been some event drastic enough to take America back to the Democrats, the way the Depression did. Right now, the political climate in the country is conservative. This was a response to the upheavals of the 60's and the rise of Reagan. 9/11 further favored the Republicans simply because of Bush having the good luck to be in charge, and thus seizing an opportunity to ride on a fake cowboy image.
We can say, of course, that those poor folk in the South voting straight GOP should be pissed about having to pay a larger percentage of the tax revenue every year, about the Social Security gradually disappearing, about their water being full of more chemicals every year. But they don't; instead, they care about making sure two men don't sleep together and looking all tough and John Wayne to the rest of the world. And their priorities may not change until something drastic happens - they don't notice these things because they happen gradually and quietly.
I don't know what can be done about this.