If the Democrats could do it all over, we wonder if they'd still pick Kerry. Yes, he wasn't Bush, which for many people, for many months, proved compelling enough. But nor did Kerry have it in him to beat Bush.

What was obvious to some at the start should be obvious to everyone now: It takes more than a simple assertion in the negative to win an election. The fitting end to the Anybody-But-Bush approach is four more years of Bush.

The peace movement stayed quiet while Kerry tried to out-macho Bush despite the fact that increasingly, Americans oppose the war and are willing to talk about leaving Iraq. Because of Kerry's pro-war position, people who voted against the war voted for Nader, Badarnik or Cobb. Those anti-war voters who supported Kerry voted for him because he wasn't Bush; and – to the surprise of the Democrats – many anti-war voters took a look at both candidates and chose Bush because at least he agreed with some of their social positions.

A Kerry victory would have been marginally better than a Bush victory. Kerry's greatest asset is that, while he’s openly religious, he's not hostile to science or beholden to those who are. What about social security, you might ask? Remember that the Democrats have done their share of dismantling the security net – look no further than Clinton's 1997 welfare reform bill – and there’s no reason to think Kerry would have bucked the trend. As James Ridgeway rightly points out this week, "There is wide agreement that Social Security should begin investing in the stock market, which amounts to another sort of foot in the door for free marketeers."

On foreign policy, an area that trumps almost everything these days, we are left searching for ways that a Kerry administration would have been preferable to the Bush administration. He repeatedly said he’d gather the support of other nations, but we’re still not clear what that meant. Support for what? It’s great if France and Germany support us, but it doesn’t matter if France and Germany support us in something we’re not really going to do.

The truth is that high emotions on both sides were unjustified. Four more years of Bush sounds like a tough sentence. But it won't result in the end of civilization as we know it. Similarly, Republicans were wrong holler about the dangers of a Kerry administration, especially considering that Kerry out-did Bush in terms of flexing his muscles.

Perhaps most of all, a Kerry administration promised to be unremarkable – a feature that Dukakis, Carter, and Mondale already proved is a losing strategy. Kerry opposed Bush, but he never really offered more than a Power Point presentation on Bush’s errors. There was no spark, no civic excitement, no sense that America would evolve under Kerry. He lacked the charisma that Clinton and JFK possessed; there was only the vague and lamely-repeated statement: “I can do better.”

What will it take for the Democrats to regain lost ground in the middle and southern part of the country? What about the poor throughout the South who didn't see a peep of Kerry – or his Good Ole’ Boy running mate – in the last nine months? What will it take for the Democrats to substitute "the working class and the poor" for the generic and vague "middle class" which they currently favor?

And what will it take for the Democrats to regain support from poor, rural people who vote Republican but have only been brought over to the GOP in recent years? Surely it’s more than guns and gay marriage that drove those voters into the arms of the Right. Republicans might have won them over, but the Democrats stood by and let them go.

Will four years be enough for the Democrats to pull themselves together? We hope they're able to redefine the party. It’s been a miserable set of decades for them; the DLC took over and the party began thinking that the way to beat Republicans was to act like them. At this point, they should realize that that’s a dead end – Democrats are poor Republican impersonators.

What they have done during their mimicry is this: they've failed to distinguish themselves on issues that get people to the polls: the economy, taxes, the war, and wealth distribution. This is the stuff that truly affects daily life. Because the Democrats don’t care for a populist agenda or rhetoric, they continue to yield ground to a party that does. Now there's little left to yield.

This year, people went to the polls to vote on abortion and gay marriage. Some of the blame lies with the American population, a largely provincial group that often must be dragged screaming into the future. Too many are held captive by their churches. Too many hold themselves in deference to such often calculating and opportunistic institutions.

But the problem also lies with Democrats for failing to focus on the ways the working class and the poor have been losing in America. Democrats must push more personal issues like gay marriage and abortion to the background and launch political issues to the fore.

The point is the Democrats need to capture support from people who might disagree with the party on cultural issues such as gay marriage, but who stand with it on taxes, war and social security. If the Democrats can't get voters to focus on such kitchen-table items, then pastors, priests and pundits will continue to dominate elections with their social agendas.

Much of the talk now concerns Bush's victory. But this conceals another fact: Kerry and the Democrats aided him. Without their incompetence and willingness to abandon issues historically central to their platform, Bush might have lost. If Bush is a gentleman, he'll send Terry McAuliffe and Kerry a thank you card. If the Democrats care about their future – our future – they'll stop paying attention to how the Republican do things and start overhauling their own game.

The Democrats have lost two elections to the most intellectually challenged politician in our lifetime. Disillusionment with the Democrats is entirely justified. They are now officially the opposition party. The question is, will they ever find their way out of this?

~ the editors
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