GregsOpinion.com

This is going to take a while. Whether or not one believes that the evangelical vote saved Bush this time around, it is still a fair point that many Dems have lost touch with the moral rationale of their worldview and this failure needs to be rectified. Witness the classic examples of Martin Luther King explain the struggle for civil rights not a 'black problem' but rather 'America's greatest moral dilemma' fully couched in terms that made Americans view the policies in place throughout the south in terms of their own moral faith as well as the guiding principles of our nation's founding. Now compare that with John Kerry making damn sure to drop a poll-tested reference to "respect" in debate questions involving abortion funding. Night and day.

But it's not just those fuzzy-minded Massachusetts liberals that don't get it. Mort Kondracke calls for Dems to head out to church in order to "get" religion ... only to uncover some gross misperceptions of his own:

My post-election advice to Democrats is: Go to church. Don't go to "get religion," although it might be good for your soul. Just go, in the first instance, to "get" religion, i.e. understand what goes on in the heads and hearts of those who devoutly believe in God and how it affects their views of the world. It will help you politically.

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Now, it's true, most Evangelicals probably would reverse Roe v. Wade and maybe outlaw abortion. They certainly favor a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage. Many - but certainly not all - oppose embryonic stem-cell research. Some kooks want to ban evolution from schoolbooks.

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I'd guess that most Evangelicals are "homophobic." Some are so in the bigoted sense, but many more in the sense that what they know of the "gay lifestyle" scares them.And they also are scared (I think, wrongly) that the already-battered institution of marriage will be demolished if committed gay couples are permitted to share in it.

While there's some half-decent advice mixed into Mort's take, it's hard to extract it from such a condescending generalization.

Jonah Goldberg takes his swing at the pitch and points out where some of the party leaders are clearly failing to grasp the problem:

CNN's Lou Dobbs asked House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., the other night, "I'm just a simple fellow, secular as I can be. Are we going to hear every politician now, because of exit polls, start couching every issue in moral or religious terms?"

She responded, "I believe that you will see more of that, but we have to get to the issues that are the role of government. I think on the values side, the so-called religious-issues side, we have to enlarge that issue, because what we're in danger of now in our country is the blurring of the issue of church and state. Our own Constitution is at stake."

Pelosi's dilemma is instructive. She desperately wants to be more accommodating to "so-called religious issues," but she can't put down her ACLU talking points about how dangerous religion is.

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Kerry said he could not "transfer" his faith onto other people by legislating it. This struck many as a political and theological dodge. Why is it OK to brag about imposing the minimum wage and affirmative action ? issues his faith is largely silent on ? based on God's will, but it's wrong to do the same thing on abortion when his church's views there are clear and ironclad? Kerry wanted it both ways: to claim he was guided by faith on the easy stuff but that he couldn't impose his religion when it wasn't politically advantageous.

The larger problem for the Democrats is that liberalism itself, or what we erroneously call liberalism today, is in a crisis. It recognizes that politics must have an underlying morality to it, but it is antagonistic to traditional morality. This is foolish since our greatest political movements ? abolitionism, civil rights, etc. ? were religious before they were political. Moreover, attempts to construct new, secular, moralities have been failures, even at the seminar level. At the national level (think feminism, Hillary Clinton's "Politics of Meaning," socialism, etc.), they've been non-starters.

By and large, it's a dead-on take regarding, primarily, the left wing of the party.

Janet Daily takes a glance at the issue from across the pond:

Now the aggrieved, "disfranchised" of New York and Los Angeles - cheered on by their friends in Britain - are saying that the American electorate is bigoted, reactionary and stupid. In Thatcherite Britain, they said that the voters were selfish, reactionary and stupid. Left-wing intellectuals, of course, are never, ever wrong. Nothing - absolutely nothing - ever causes them to question their own beliefs. It is the rest of the world that is out of step. And the rest of you - the great democratic mass of people who have the temerity to think your own thoughts and come to your own conclusions - are scarcely worthy of the franchise.

Democracy is suitable only for the enlightened - which is to say for people who accept the assumptions of the Guardian/BBC world view. If you cannot produce the right result in an election - even after you have been told very clearly by everybody from Robert Redford to Michael Moore what to think - then you are beneath contempt, and we are licensed by the household gods of liberal ideology to call you names. (On Radio 4's News Quiz last week, Jeremy Hardy described Bush and his followers as "stupid, crazy, ignorant, bellicose Christian fundamentalists". Presumably, by BBC logic, this does not constitute bigotry but wit.)

The disease is accurarately diagnosed here ... and it underscores one of the traumas the left must endure from this election: the recurring need to question one's assumptions is a fundamental precept of the progressive spirit. When the left fails to see anything wrong in their own worldview and insist the problem is within that of the so-called "moral issue voters," there's a fundamental disconnect that turns a liberal into something else alltogether. The irony is that this sort of ideological inflexibility is the very concept that seems to bother the so-called liberals the most.

I include this reflection because I've already seen more than my fair share of liberal responses to this election that fit the same bill. "We have to educate the religious right" ... emails showing the fictional relationship between a state's average IQ and which President they supported ... countless stories to highlight how hypocritical so many "value voters" tend to be ... the list goes on. And it's perplexing. Do I really want to believe that I was on the losing side of an election to a bunch of brainless nitwits who order prayer blankets from even more brainless nitwits preaching the so-called gospel on television? As I recall telling someone in conversation at a political gathering: "they're not beating us in elections because they're stupid." America may be far and away more secular than I or any member of the religious right wishes it to be, but there will (hopefully) be a continuous need to connect with our "better angels" and a strive towards national "self actualization" that gives meaning to the continual progressive drive that the majority of Americans still believe in. This is a drive best expressed through religious meaning rather than secular or scientific meaning. Always has been, always will.

Among the problematic ranks, Joe Conason warns against any efforts to "cater to the religious right" ... as if emphasizing the need to care for the environment derives from our call to be good stewards of the earth is another bigoted entry into political discourse. To be fair, however, it is more those touchy social issues that worry the left more than anything else. Yet the one phrase I've not seen mentioned enough in regards to the Democratic Party during this discussion has been that of our role as the "Big Tent" party. And it perhaps that very narrowing and exclusion of those who see things differently on the issue of abortion, gay marriage, etc that makes that very term more and more distant from reality.

In this vein, I have a modest proposal. I make no secret of my own views, but while I'm pro-life and against gay marriage, let's at least get the party back to a point where we agreed that there was a basis of honest debate and disagreement on these issues rather than picking sides in the culture wars and blaming the Pat Buchanans of the world for starting the fight. Let's go back to the big tent, in other words. There's still a fair sample of elected officials representing the moderate wing of the party ... why not just admit them as proudly as any of the rest of our ilk and invite more like them into our fold, as opposed to apologizing for them as Democrats? A few more Ben Nelsons, Harry Reids, Mark Pryors, and Evan Bayhs wouldn't exactly hurt the party.

Perhaps not surprising, but one of my favorite columnists has one work that I find particularly compelling. Scot Lehigh adds:

"I think it's a mistake for Democrats to say, well, we just lost another one because we didn't have a very strong candidate," Gergen, an independent, said. "It strikes me that there is something much deeper going on here."

After all, Gergen noted, the Democrats have lost seven of the last 10 presidential elections; they have not won a majority of the white vote since 1964; and they have not won a majority of the popular vote since 1976.

All that hints that the Democrats need more than cosmetic changes. It means that the party has to find a way to connect once again with voters who currently do not think Democrats understand their lives or share their cultural concerns. And if you need a candidate that can play more strongly in the Midwest and the South, that, in turn, would suggest adjusting the nominating process to give those regions more say.

The last Democratic presidential nominee who showed a real ability to play in diverse regions of the country was, of course, Bill Clinton. And indeed, watching yet another Democratic nominee go down to defeat, one can't help but have a renewed appreciation for what Clinton accomplished in defeating an incumbent president in 1992 and then in getting reelected in 1996.

But to do that, Clinton took positions, or made ideological compromises, that many Democrats and constituency groups found objectionable. He supported the death penalty. He spoke of, and then acted upon, a willingness to end welfare as we know it. He signed the Defense of Marriage Act. And he was a strong proponent of free trade.

All of which raises several difficult questions. Is it better to chart a new course, as Clinton did, or to suffer long years in the political doldrums, hoping that the Republicans will overplay their hand or that voters will naturally come around to the Democratic point of view?

Or is there a way, without sacrificing the party's essential values, of addressing more issues that matter to red-state voters? (Kerry, for example, largely abandoned the concerns about the coarsening popular culture that Clinton, Al Gore, and Joe Lieberman had all expressed.)

Although more reflective than prescriptive, Lehigh nails the dilemna for the party straight on. The temptation is there to say "Well we lost a close race, only minor changes are needed." But that ignores the larger problems that this loss underscored.

Another way to view this is with a sports metaphor. Some games, you go into knowing a win is tough to pull out. If you lose badly, it doesn't hurt as much. When Dukakis went down in 1988, it wasn't a total shock. We'd been reeling from the effects of the Reagan Revolution, the south was hardening for the GOP, and Duke clearly had some failings as a Presidential candidate. When Duke lost, not many people shed tears and the recriminations came easily. I know, I had a bit part in researching for one of the better ones. That was then, this was now. The election of 2004 is as much a confirmation as to how Bill Clinton has changed the perceptions of his party as well as confirmation of how much is left undone. If 1988 was like was like watching this season's Univ. of Houston vs Oklahoma football game ... 2004 was closer to watching this season's USC team take on Oklahoma. It's those powerhouse matchups whose losses leave us with more to take from it. There are no moral victories in games such as that. The losses generally expose the shortcomings that the losing team must rectify if next time is to be any different. They also sting a whole lot more. Rarely do such losses merely come down to one or two simple breaks, and this past election is no different.

Karl Rove correctly believed he could ignore the middle and make the election a contest of right versus left by painting Kerry as an effete liberal elitist. He got close enough in that depiction ... even closer among those conservatives the pitch was aimed at. Team Kerry did all it could do to craft a center-left coalition. Moderates were won by a narrow 55-45 margin. But it wasn't enough. Moderates had to choose between the Rove view that this was an election between left and right and that moderates simply had to choose a side versus the Shrum/Kerry view that Kerry was very much in line with the Democratic Party that Clinton had reinvented. Neither was a slam dunk case. But had the sales job been easier on our side, that 55-45 clip would have likely turned into a 60-40 pace that could have made the difference. The key for the Democratic Party henceforth is not to morph into the religious right ... but rather to continue living up to that party that warrants the majority of the vast moderate swathe of votes that still places its faith in us. In the process of doing that, we can - and should - place our worldview within a moral rationale. In other words, in the act of winning over that missing 3% or so needed to reach parity, you aim for about 10% or more of the vote. If you have any hope of transforming the party back to its majority status, you reach into more and more states to expand the battlefield ... and you'll find that that will mean more and more overtures to moderate - and yes, conservative - voters. One cannot constantly run for the Oval Office on the strength of 20 states if you end up ceding the Senate seats of the other 30 to the other party. Do the math, it gets rather unsightly. Along these lines, the Christian Science Monitor editorial gets the hint ...

This election was close, which should caution the Democrats against making abrupt ideological changes. Lurching left at a time when the country appears to be moving in the opposite direction would be a mistake.

They should deal carefully with the hot debate topic to emerge from this election: moral values. Exit polls showed one-fifth of voters said "moral values" most influenced their choice, and the overwhelming majority of those voters backed Bush. But about a fifth of voters also said that jobs and the economy were most important, and they mostly went for Kerry.

Should Democrats suddenly veer right, based on an undefined, highly subjective term that polled equally with jobs? Far more advisable would be for them to find better, more inclusive ways to communicate their core values on everything from helping the poor to ensuring civil and personal rights to not burdening future generations with huge debts.

Because of its complexity, the "message" job may be harder and take more thought than the most obvious task ahead: taking the fight to "red" (i.e., rural and Republican) America.

After three consecutive election losses (including the last mid-terms), the Democrats can no longer afford to be noncompetitive in GOP territory.

If there's a clear lesson to be learned, it's that the next Democratic nominee will have to come from GOP-land: the middle or south of the country. Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter got that right.

Some more good points available for perusing: