However, we also DO NOT need to have a good old-fashioned intraparty civil war after finally achieving a powerful degree of unity, especially after losing one of the closest presidential elections in history, measured in terms of percentage and EVs.
The fact is that no incumbent president who sought reelection has ever lost or even come this close to losing at a time when the public considered the US to be at war. (LBJ took himself out and all the eventual 1968 candidates supported the Vietnam War to one degree or another.) Many Americans, especially out here in the red states, just can't bring themselves to vote against a war even when it is going badly. Perhaps especially when it is going badly. For more on this, see http://www.dailykos.com/story/2004/11/4/35654/9055 . We may not have able to win this.
Given these facts, it seems so self-defeating to insult and purge those who tried to help the Democrats during this campaign, as some of the posters above did and as I expect DLC types will continue to do as they fight to get their Clinton-era influence back. Every party has to have its beyond-the-mainstream activists and "nuts." These are the people who end up doing a lot of the work and donating a lot of the money and showing up at the events. In this campaign, the Deaniacs and Naderites and MoveOn people loyally worked a for a Democratic candidate far more conservative than they would have liked. We will need their work again, especially now that labor unions are so much less able to provide the ground support they once did. Electorally speaking, we will need left-leaning activists not to go off on more Nader-like tangents.
The current GOP electoral machine is built on energizing its "nuts." Do you really think all of mainstream America loves Jerry Falwell or Rush Limbaugh or the various rabid dogs on Faux News? (Hell, they don't even like Dick Cheney.) Yet these out-of-the-mainstream wingnuts play a vital role in the current Republican majority. They get the stories and ideas out that are too hot for the actual officials to handle. They take down Bush's enemies and respond to his critics in terms and ways that Bush himself or anyone in actual authority cannot. They energize the base.
The Democrats need people to play these roles, too. Granted, maybe Al Sharpton does not need to be treated like a great statesmen and should not be allowed to become the face of the party as he did at times on TV this fall, but Democrats do need some lively, two-fisted public spokespeople of their own. If we don't like the comedians and rockers and provocateurs we have, we had better find some new ones. Franken and Moore and others have simply filled a gap that the party itself has not been able to fill.
Regarding message problems, I agree much of my fellow Kansas native Thomas Frank's analysis. We do need to somehow bring economic issues back into political salience, but it cannot be in the form of the lame populism seen in the last two Democratic presidential campaigns, apparently under the influence of Shrum. I winced at the weakness and clumsiness of the "Help is on the way" and "I have a plan" mantras that Kerry used, coupled as they were with unclear proposals explained only in terms of too-good-to-be-true promises. Kerry's actual views were really quite moderate and consonant with most Americans' beliefs, but he presented them in ways that sounded like the stereotype of a pandering liberal politician: Goodies for everyone, and it won't cost you a dime!
Populism might work, but the policies that go with it need to be more clearly communicated and linked with larger moral-political values as Clinton did in 1992. Christianity properly understood, as seen in the Gospels especially, would be a great foundation for the Democratic values of tolerance, mercy, and egalitiarianism (not to mention peace). Constantly expressing Democratic values and policies in Christian terms might be a better way of reaching some working-class white Christian voters than me-tooish references to personal faith.
Finally, though lurching to the left in some general way would be a great mistake, Democrats do need to focus on and highlight core issue positions that enjoy the support of many of most Americans even in the red states.
A reasonable but powerfully expressed environmentalism is one area that both Kerry and incredibly, Gore, failed to exploit. This has to be done in terms of protecting things Americans love -- children, neighborhoods, national parks, personal health -- rather than sterotypical environmental abstractions and (as many see it) minutiae like obscure endangered species and distant wildife refuges. Even Republicans jog and go camping. Stewardship of the world God gave us could resonates with Christians. Keeping the air and water clean and the parks open and unspoiled are really motherhood issues that Democratic candidates could absolutely own but never seem to emphasize. This is one area where I suspect the closeness of current Democratic elites with the corporate lobbyist world may be hampering the party.
Another area Democrats should be able to make inroads is libertarianism. Especially among suburban & rural white men, a libertarian outlook is just as common as an evangelical Christian one. My wife heard lots of this canvassing the neighborhood this fall, from people who did not like a lot of Bush's policies but probably voted for him anyway. Kerry's overstated and unconvincing (even if accurate) attempts to look tough on terror led him to straddle on the issue of the Patriot Act and the various other shenanigans of the Ashcroft Justice Department. Unvarnished opposition to the Patriot Act and other invasions of privacy might have peeled off some suburban libertarians who otherwise were given relatively little reason not to go with their usual stereotypes about Big Gummint liberals.
OK, I need to quit writing now, but there is some advice from a red-state Democrat.
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