In their despair, some Democratic commentators have compared 2004 to 1964, the Lyndon Johnson landslide that destroyed the GOP and forced Barry Goldwater and his southern and western conservatives to re-imagine the Republican party.
But this is not 1964, when Johnson won 61 per cent of the popular vote and 486 electoral college votes. Bush won by what was still a relatively small margin, against a weak candidate lacking the common touch of Bill Clinton or even Al Gore. Rather than sinking into despair and tearing apart the party, Democrats must consider the kind of tweaks they need to make to win in 2008 and rebuild the party's ability to connect with voters.
For a start, the party should get over its infatuation with newly elected Illinois senator Barack Obama and embrace a lesser known model: Virginia governor Mark Warner. Whereas Obama is more liberal than Kerry, and triumphed in a heavily Democratic state, Warner won the 2001 gubernatorial election in a state Bush took easily this November, and has remained popular throughout his term in Virginia. Warner, a former venture capitalist, did so by creating an overarching narrative for his campaign, and by reassuring Virginians that he shared their traditional values while also rallying new Democratic voting blocs - Hispanics, hi-tech knowledge workers - and older parts of the Democratic base. Indeed, Warner emphasised his devotion to gun-owners' rights, and, like Clinton, was comfortable talking about values, in a way that Kerry was not.
In so doing, Warner won over enough white men in Virginia to take the election, since he also captured large numbers of college-educated workers, women, Hispanics and African-Americans - typical Democratic voters. In the 2004 presidential election, 62 per cent of white men voted for President Bush, as well as 78 per cent of evangelicals, and in a Los Angeles Times poll, more than half of Bush voters cited "moral values" as a major reason for backing him. Democrats are unlikely to win a majority of white men any time soon, or a huge percentage of voters who vote on moral values, but they must make enough inroads to take a national election.
This is not impossible. As Amy Sullivan, an expert on religion and politics, has written, the Democrats could court so-called "religious moderates," Catholics and more moderate suburban evangelicals, who have at times supported Democratic politicians like Clinton. The Democrats can do so by talking more clearly about how religion informs their worldviews, and their views on domestic policy; Kerry frequently insisted that religion did not have an impact on his political stances. This "moral vision" about world events, as Sullivan calls it, shows Americans that the candidate is truly sincere about his or her religious beliefs. It also allows candidates to frame issues around values, as Clinton and Bush have done. Gaining credibility on moral issues will also help Democrats to hold onto Catholic Hispanics, who gave nearly 40 per cent of their votes to Bush. Unfortunately, this may also mean decreasing some of the push for gay marriage by activist groups - an issue that clearly brought many conservatives to the voting booths.
The Democrats will need to keep the hard left/Michael Moore wing of the party more in check. Though Moore gained enormous media attention, and leftist political action committees did help boost voter turnout, they also alienated crucial swing voters in states like Ohio and Pennsylvania with polarising rhetoric. Though the Democratic party must keep the hard left in the fold, to stop it from splitting off and forming a new party, it also will have to keep the left's anger muted. There is a precedent: in the late 1990s, the GOP persuaded radical Christian activists and cultural warriors to keep quiet, so that George W Bush's first presidential campaign could present the Texas governor as a moderate "compassionate conservative."
Perhaps most important, the Democratic party will need to restore its credibility on national security. Shockingly, despite the importance of terrorism as an issue, Kerry failed to do so. Instead, he spoke primarily about his credentials as a Vietnam veteran, trying to use his biography to shield himself from having to take a serious stand on security issues. Kerry never offered a coherent critique of Bush's handling of Iraq, a clear policy for how he would handle the war on terror, or persuasive new ideas on how to improve homeland security, which the president has drastically underfunded. (As the New Republic reported, in the lead up to November, polls showed Kerry gaining on Bush only when he persuaded people that he could do a better job in the Iraq war.) Yet without this consistent vision, Kerry left the door open for the GOP's attack machine to define him as a flip-flopper indebted to foreign nations.
Ultimately, for any of these strategies to work, the Democrats also need to create a media machine equivalent to the conservative machine - that combination of conservative talk radio, think tanks, Fox News television, the Washington Times newspaper, and right-wing publishing houses like Regnery - that can develop the party line, or create a news story, such as the Swift Boat veterans' attacks on Kerry, and force it into the public consciousness. As Jason Zengerle of the New Republic revealed this fall, liberal efforts to create such a machine - the Al Franken-led radio station Air America, the new think tank Centre for American Progress - have sputtered badly, never succeeding in pushing liberal stories into the public consciousness.
This is not entirely the organisers' fault: by failing to enunciate simple messages as Bush did, the Kerry campaign did not provide clear direction for the left-wing machine to rally around. And because Democrats often pay more attention to mainstream, centrist media outlets like the Washington Post and New York Times, they worried that if they hit the president too hard, they might alienate the media. As the Washington Monthly's Paul Glastris wrote about Al Gore's reticence to get tough in the 2000 recount, Gore did not attack enough because he cared too much about journalists' opinions of himself. Bush, by contrast, who had little regard for the mainstream media, did whatever he wanted.
Again, in 2004, the left-wing machine, and the Democratic National Committee, played too fair. When the Swift Boat veterans began to spread their story in August, for example, the Kerry campaign, and by extension the left-wing machine, waited several weeks to hit back, to call the charges what they were - lies. If they don't learn to play hardball effectively, Democrats will be drowning their sorrows again on election night 2008.
