Please read this whole diary before you jump to conclusions.
First: we need to clearly recognize that the 2004 elections were a major blow to the Democratic party. When you lose a presidential election to a very unpopular incumbent, lose seats in the Senate and lose seats in the House, you are doing something wrong on the national level. Let's please kill the idea that this was just a bump in the road to a bluer America. It was a painful setback.
So what have the Democrats been doing wrong?
A quick political history lesson: politics is fundamentally bipolar. In every time, every place, every age, there are two basic political philosophies. There are conservatives, and there are liberals. (Sometimes one or the other of these "proto-parties" will fracture to produce smaller groups, but those smaller groups will form coalitions and work together more often than not.) It appears increasingly likely that variance in political predilection is mostly genetic (if that word makes you cringe, please read Steven Pinker's
The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature, a book every liberal should read). But whatever the cause, the division is real and conditions a very wide range of stances on issues, from the perceived role of the judiciary to the desire for a strong military and foreign-policy adventurism. It's surprisingly hard to boil down the conservative/liberal distinction to just a few words, but as Justice Potter Stewart said in another context, we know each when we see it.
So how does this apply to the 2004 election? Simple -- the Democrats were trying not to be the liberal party. In poker terms, they let themselves get bluffed into throwing away their hand. Every time Bush or Cheney or Rove or Martinez or Coburn used the scare word "liberal", the Democrats folded, falling back on weak semantic arguments or insisting that they were "moderate" or had no connection with the "liberal establishment" of their party. Why? Because their polling and focus groups showed them that the electorate doesn't like liberals, and only a small minority of Americans now call themselves liberal. Some Democrats even went to the ridiculous extreme of calling themselves "conservatives" (this is mostly a relic from the Dixiecrat days).
What they failed to realize is that you can't win by being "the moderate party" or "the other conservative party". As Monty Python deathlessly put it, if you want to argue you must take up a contrary position. That means figuring out what you stand for and articulating it. We all know the kinds of things liberals stand for: civil rights, equality, individual liberty, tolerance, protection of the disadvantaged, workers' rights, human rights, environmentalism. The Democrats need to take back those issues, conclusively and wholeheartedly.
I'm not just cribbing from Lakoff here. I hate buzzwords like "framing". The problem isn't "framing", which implies that we are just not using the right terminology. The problem is internal. The Democratic Party has lost its moral compass. It has lost its ability to take unpopular but necessary positions. I don't know when that happened, but I suspect it coincides pretty well with the rise of "scientific polling" and paid political consultants (that's another rant altogether). We have forgotten, somewhere along the line, that if you lead from the heart, people will follow you. Was the country full of New Deal liberals when FDR was elected? Was it full of antisegregationists when JFK won? Was it packed with small-government conservatives when Reagan stomped Carter in 1980? No: those movements became ascendant only after their leaders convinced them of the rightness and necessity of their cause.
I don't want to lay all the blame on any particular candidate, certainly not John Kerry. I believe he is a decent, honorable and courageous man and would have been a good president. But he simply did not show the passionate intensity of speech and behavior that shows the electorate I am Right; I believe in what I am doing; I can make us a better nation, not just a more prosperous or more feared one. He relied on what seems to have become the Dem party line: hew to the middle; don't say anything that anyone might find objectionable or frightening; play it safe. Thus the electorate was faced with a choice between the devil they knew and the devil they didn't, and chose predictably.
One last thought: don't write off the evangelical vote. Most evangelicals are not single-issue voters, regardless of what Karl Rove would like Democrats to believe. My mother-in-law, who lives in Georgia and is as conservative and religious as they come, voted for Kerry. The main reason was that she had seen "Fahrenheit 9/11" -- seen the images of mutilated Iraqi children and grieving American mothers. She understood that war is a moral wrong. And what did the Democrats do with Moore's powerful and touching film? They scrambled away from it as quickly as they could. How many evangelical votes like my mother-in-law's did they lose? How many in Ohio?
Maybe in 2008, if we pull together, we can find out.