Ending Our Losing Ways [View All]

[ConservativeDemocrat]

I felt pretty foolish when I put my hand through a window just before Election Day. It turns out I was just beating the rush. Across the country, the same Democrats who stood in line for 10 hours to vote George W. Bush out of office are now standing in line to jump off the nearest cliff. After an Election Day that began with nerve-mending surgery at Sibley Hospital in Washington and ended in nerve-shattering despair at Kerry headquarters in Boston, all I can say to my fellow Democrats is: I feel your pain.

This loss hurts so deeply because the stakes were so high, and our side wanted to win so much. In Boston, a Kerry supporter told me of a voter in such a rush to get to the polls that he ran headfirst into a traffic sign. As soon as the man came to his senses, he shook it off, put his head down and charged on to vote.

Even in defeat we can be proud of that resolve. But if Democrats want to become a majority party again anytime soon, we'd better look where we're going. We can start by using this loss to look forward, not back. John Kerry and John Edwards did everything our party asked of them, and then some. No campaign is perfect, but this one did an awful lot right -- winning the debates, raising record sums of money, earning more votes than any Democratic ticket in history.

If we can avoid the circular firing squad that followed past defeats, we will see the deeper, more daunting challenge that awaits us. We ran a good campaign against a bad president, and we still got beat.

The rest can be found on the DLC website.

- C.D. Proud Member of the Reality Based Community