WILL THE DEMOCRATS LEARN THEIR LESSON?

It looks like the Democrats are headed for their biggest defeat in thirty years. Think about it. In 1980, 1984 and 1988, they lost the White House but held Congress. They lost Congress in 1994 but held the White House for another six years. In 2000, they lost the White House and Congress but won the popular vote in the presidential election. And they soon regained the Senate with Jim Jeffords' defection. In 2002, they lost the Senate by one seat, and since then the Republicans have controlled the White House and both Houses of Congress, but narrowly. And Bush still has his dubious 2000 mandate.

On November 2nd, George W. Bush will probably win the White House by a substantial margin, and the Republicans will gain seats in the Senate and hold the House. An era of Republican dominance will have begun, which might last a generation for all we know. After the Democrats gave this campaign everything they had, the voice of the people will have rejected them. How will they take it?

Josh Marshall is already finding excuses for Kerry losing the debates:

But the point is that we have a pretty good idea what the president is going to say. And what he'll almost certainly say will open up a number of solid lines of attack. But if the Democrats don't hit the ground running with a plan in mind they'll be overwhelmed by the GOP spin machine.

Blogger Daily Kos describes the spin machine, or noise machine, in more detail at The Guardian.

What is the Rightwing Noise Machine? Conservatives in the United States have spent the last 30 years building a vast infrastructure designed to create ideas, distribute them, and sell them to the American public. It spans multiple think tanks and a well-oiled message machine that has a stranglehold on American discourse. From the Weekly Standard, Rush Limbaugh, Wall Street Journal, Drudge Report and Murdoch's Fox News, to (more recently) the mindless drones in the rightwing blogosphere, the right enjoys the ability to control entire news cycles, holding them hostage for entire elections.

Mindless drones of the right-wing blogosphere, eh? Would that be the likes of Andrew Sullivan and Glenn Reynolds? And me? Daily Kos adds that:

We had witnessed the goring of Gore, yet sat by, helplessly unable to fight back. We saw the Democratic party get outmanoeuvred in Florida, legally and rhetorically. We looked around for a "liberal media", yet found nothing of the sort.

The "liberal media" is the New York Times, the Washington Post, CNN and the rest. Otherwise known as the establishment media. But the establishment has been losing ground. People are voting with their remote controls, their mouses, and the knobs on their dashboards for an alternative media of blogs, cable news channels, and radio talk shows. The bloggers at redstate.org report, for example, that the Fox News Channel now gets more viewers than all its rivals combined.

The "spin machine" story assumes that people are stupid sheep, passively swayed by whatever comes along. A condescending view of people, that. A leftist view, one might say. I suppose the solution is that the government steps in and regulates the content of news channels, so that they lean in a more liberal-- or, "objective," or whatever word seems most suitable-- direction?

But people are not stupid sheep. Not the American people, especially. They work hard, they generally have a high level of education, and they think for themselves.

Gore did not lose because of some unfair advantage on the part of a right-wing spin machine. Why he lost, he demonstrated pretty well this morning in the NYT, in his advice to Kerry on how to debate Bush. Gore claims that:

But more important than his record as a debater is Mr. Bush's record as a president. And therein lies the true opportunity for John Kerry - because notwithstanding the president's political skills, his performance in office amounts to a catastrophic failure. And the debates represent a time to hold him to account. For the voters, these debates represent an opportunity to explore four relevant questions: Is America on the right course today, or are we off track? If we are headed in the wrong direction, what happened and who is responsible? How do we get back on the right path to a safer, more secure, more prosperous America? And, finally, who is best able to lead us to that path?

A clear majority of Americans believe that we are heading in the wrong direction. The reasons are obvious. The situation in Iraq is getting worse. Osama bin Laden is alive and plotting against us. About 2.7 million manufacturing jobs have been lost. Forty-five million Americans are living without health insurance. Medicare premiums are the highest they've ever been. Environmental protections have been eviscerated.

Sorry, Gore, Americans just can't be fooled into thinking that the Bush years were a catastrophic failure. A loss of manufacturing jobs is part of a shifting global division of labor. The economy has been growing strongly. Unemployment is higher than in the unsustainably booming year 2000, but is still quite low by historical or international standards. To report people living without health insurance as a policy failure is to take for granted that everyone should have it, i.e. socialized medicine, but many Americans don't think so. Medicare premiums are high because health care costs are rising. And where's the evidence that our country is being turned into a wasteland? I live in one of America's biggest metropolises and I breathe just fine. I don't know how the national parks are faring, because I can't get to them. If I had more money, I might go find out. What I need, if I value the beauty of nature, is not environmental protections, but economic growth. Gore blew the huge Clinton legacy he inherited with stupid thinking like this. If Gore had said "while the Bush administration has certainly had some impressive successes, a new administration might be in a better position to consolidate what Bush has accomplished, while avoiding some of Bush's major failings, of which the largest is the deficit," I would listen, and maybe be convinced. When Gore calls Bush a "catastrophic failure," he has lost me, and insulted my intelligence to boot.

It's very important, it's critical for the future of our country, that the Democrats understand they will not lose this election because of dirty tricks, or media bias, or even the candidates' relative personal appeal. They will lose it because they deserve to lose. They will lose because Americans don't like their muddled, gloomy, weak message. To be competitive again, they must change. They must convert. This change must be very deep. They must scoff at guys like Gore and McAuliffe. They should denounce Michael Moore and stop reading Paul Krugman. They should look at the Republicans, drop their disdain, and give them some respect.

We have one good political party in this country. We need two. Please, please, PLEASE, Democrats, learn the lesson!

And who knows, I might just be a swing voter in 2006!