2004 Election: What Happens to the Losing Team?

Coming after the 2000 cliffhanger and a negative, hard-fought campaign, it's no surprise that John Kerry's loss would leave Democrats deflated and searching for answers. "We had the money, we had a ground operation the likes of which has never been seen, and we had a good candidate who stood toe to toe with the President and bested him in three debates," sighs Harold Ickes, who ran two of the cash-rich outside groups that sprang up in this election to help the Democrats contend with the G.O.P. fund-raising advantage. "We had all that, and we still lost. People are going to ask, 'What do we have to do?' There's going to be a real aftershock."

With aftershock there usually comes second-guessing and recrimination. Picking over the tactical blunders and missed opportunities is a tradition in any post-election recovery. But political parties tend to make major course corrections only in the wake of catastrophe. That's what happened after the 1988 race, when the elder Bush eviscerated the hapless Michael Dukakis to deliver the G.O.P. a third straight electoral landslide. Out of the ashes of that defeat and a struggle between the party's liberal and moderate wings arose a Bible-citing, charisma-infused Southern moderate named Bill Clinton, who went on to give the Democrats their only presidential triumphs in a generation. Having lost two close and winnable elections in a row since the Clinton era ended, is it time for the Democrats to engage in another round of intraparty bloodletting before they settle into the task of selecting their nominee for 2008?

It depends on which Democrat you ask. "In the 1980s, we got hit by a political 2-by-4," says Bruce Reed, president of the centrist Democratic Leadership Council, which helped launch Clinton on his way to the White House in 1992. "This election was a whole lot more complicated. It was so close that it's unlikely to be a learning experience for Democrats. I suspect there'll be more finger pointing than soul searching. And that's a shame." For Reed and other so-called New Democrats who struggle to keep the party from veering too far to the left, Kerry was a vast improvement over Howard Dean, who rode a wave of antiwar and anti-Bush sentiment to prominence before crashing in the primaries. But, insists Reed, Kerry should have run a better campaign. "We can't let George Bush define our future. That's where the Dean and Kerry campaigns both came up short," he says ruefully. "Democrats need to put forward our vision of how to win the war on terror. Defeating terrorism is going to be the defining issue for years to come. For our party's sake and our country's sake, we have to get it right because Americans won't take us seriously until we do."