Just got this from a friend of mine who we worked with in the 2004 election. It's an email response he sent to a friend of his in Omaha who was blaming Kerry for the loss...

I take issue with blaming Kerry for losing the election. No doubt, Kerry made his mistakes--notably too much about his heroism in Vietnam and not enough about his and the party's program for the country, and not responding quickly and forcefully enough, angrily enough, to the Swiftboat Veterans for Lies: he should have challenged Bush in the first debate: Do you or do you not repudiate this bunch?

Go back, though, to 2000. The Democrats could and I think would have won if, starting with the stolen election, they hadn't insisted on playing patty-cake while the Republicans played hardball.
Go back further: In the 1824 election, Andrew Jackson and the Democrats attacked the "corrupt bargain" that John Adams made with Henry Clay to win his electoral votes and the election. They kept it up until 1828, when Jackson won. After the Supreme Court selected Bush, however, the Democrats bitched a bit but then let the matter go. Do you think the Republicans would have done that if the situation had been reversed? Hell, no, they'd have screamed bloody murder and continued screaming about the theft for four years.
Remember what the Republicans did to Clinton, their eight-year jihad? Well, the Democrats didn't need to engage in those kinds of vicious, mendacious personal attacks on Junior. All they had to do was tell the truth about him--the fact that everything he got he got by family connections, his failures in everything he ever tried to do only to be bailed out by his Daddy's friends, his little exercise in insider trading--selling stock in his oil company just before it tanked, and the phony SEC investigation that let him off the hook--and the sweetheart deal that made him a wealthy front man for a baseball team. They could have nailed him with Enron and "Kenny boy" and the other corporate scandals. At a Democratic fund-raiser I asked Senator Corzine why the Democrats weren't bringing these matters up. He said people wouldn't understand this complex financial finagling. The hell they wouldn't, I said, my wife and I had a big batch of Enron. He just grimaced.

Again, the Democrats let Bush get away with successfully exploiting 9/11. We played the patriotic card instead of doing what the Republicans, you can bet your life, would have done: blamed President Gore. Before 9/11, the Bush Administration's defense priority was Star Wars; it paid no attention to terrorism (remember that Presidential Daily Briefing that Bush probably didn't even read at the ranch and Condi's attempt to make out that it didn't say what it said)?

And again, why didn't the Democrats really challenge Bush on those WMDs that didn't exist? Why didn't they demand the evidence that Saddam Hussein had them--and could deliver them? Why did they just go along, playing the patriotic card again, for all the good it did them?

Why did they let Bush get away with blaming the CIA for bad intelligence when in fact Bush ignored the CIA's (and the State Department's) doubts? Why didn't they keep up a barrage of attacks on the administration for the chaos that ensued after our troops took Baghdad, mock him again and again for "mission accomplished," denounce the failure to plan for immediate post-hostilities (the State Department did make plans, but the Administration ignored them), the stupidity of disbanding the Iraqi army, and the sweetheart contracts to Halliburton, to mention a few examples?
The bipartisan committee on 9/11, the Senate joint committee, the Duelfer report--all produced solid information that the Democrats could have used to blast the administration. Instead they let Bush get away with his posture of being the great wartime leader, the only one who could defend our country. They let the Republicans mock Kerry as a flip-flopper when in fact Bush has been the flip-flopper extraordinaire on issue after issue--among others that come to mind, opposition to a Homeland Security Agency, then taking credit for it; opposition to the 9/11 commission investigation, then accepting it; declining to testify before it then agreeing but only accompanied by his nanny, Vice President Cheney; and posing as "a uniter, not a divider," when he has been undoubtedly the most divisive President in our history.

During my campaigning for the Democrats in my precinct I talked to a middle-aged woman in our neighborhood who informed me that she was voting for Bush. I said I was curious to know why. She said because he was a leader. Do you agree with him on the issues, I asked. On choice, for example. No, she didn't agree with him on that. How about stem cell research? No, she didn't agree with him. His environmental policies. Well, no, she didn't think so. She just thought he was a leader. And why? Because he kept telling her he was. And the Democrats let him get away with it.
Sure, the Republicans got votes out exploiting the three Gs--guns, gays and God--and distracting voters by talking about family values, whatever they are, but that's not why they scored 51 percent. They didn't win; we lost.

So what do we do now? We remember what Mr. Dooley said a century ago: "Politics ain't beanbag."

When Bush renames 20 rightwing judges, we oppose them, filibuster them if necessaryi. When he proposed to cut Pell grants and make it costlier for kids to go to college, we tell families what it means to them. We talk about the family values of affording college education. When Bush proposes to shift more Medicaid costs to the states, we join Republican and Democratic governors in raising hell. When he pushes that cockamamie Social Security privatization, a.k.a. destruction, plan, we don't offer to compromise, we fight it tooth and claw. When he proposes to make it easier to log and drill in national forests, we summon a coalition of tree-huggers, hunters and fishermen to block it.

Sure, we may lose a few, but at least the American people will know where we stand, and the fact is, we stand where most of them stand. Let us remember, and act upon, the advice of Sen. Robert A. Taft, "Mr. Republican": "The function of the opposition is to oppose.