Over the last couple of days I've heard a lot of excuses over why Kerry lost the election: he ran a bad campaign, he was outspent, there were too many evangelicals, and a host of others. But what I haven't heard as much of is an examination of what is wrong with the Democratic Party itself that makes it seemingly unable to win Presidential or Congressional elections. As I said the other day, a favorite quote of mine is "if you always do what you've always done, you'll always get what you've always gotten." If the Democratic Party wants to start winning again it has to start doing something different.

I firmly believe that the following things must be done to fix the Party and start winning again:

1) Acknowledge that values and security are the two most important things to the public in post-9/11 America.

2) Stop ceding the entire South to Republicans; a party relegated to the two coasts cannot win.

3) Come up with a simple, clear, easy-to-explain ideology that voters of all persuasions can agree are important.

4) Seize the banner of fiscal responsibility permanently, first suggested by Clinton's balanced budgets, after  years of horrendous deficits and potentially great impending economic harm under Republican leadership makes that party forever unable to re-claim their status as the party of fiscal prudence.

5) Acknowledge charisma and empathy matter more than pure intellect, and nominate candidates that can connect with voters.

A lot of people more eloquent than I am are writing a lot about these issues at the moment. I'll therefore content myself by copying here articles that speak to one or more of these guiding principles.

There is an excellent article from Businessweek that addresses points #1, 2 and 3.

THE WORLD HAS CHANGED, NOT THE DEMS

Another Presidential election has been lost, and more could be on the way unless the Democrats shake up the party.

Democratic operatives are quick to dismiss John Kerry's defeat as the byproduct of political circumstance: a flawed, flip-flopping candidate and a misfiring campaign that couldn't persuade voters to replace the Commander-in-Chief in the middle of the war on terror. But such excuses, while partly valid, miss the bigger point: Democrats keep losing Presidential elections they could have won.

Yes, the aloof, aristocratic Kerry wasn't anyone's idea of a dream candidate. But there were also fatal weaknesses in Al Gore's 2000 bid. And what about Michael Dukakis? And Walter Mondale? They were all judged far too liberal to be entrusted with the White House.

A CRACKING COALITION

George W. Bush's 2004 victory highlights problems with a Presidential nominating process that regularly leads Democrats to select out-of-the-cultural-mainstream candidates. For the better part of three decades, Dems have struggled to remain competitive in elections where most voters thought they were out of step on security and values.

Without neutralizing those concerns, Democrats have little chance of once again becoming the majority party they were from the New Deal through the Great Society. "Something went wrong [in 2004] besides a lousy candidate," says John Kenneth White, a political scientist at Catholic University. "Democrats need to say: 'We ought to look to see if we have a party problem here.'"

The narrowness of Kerry's Electoral College defeat may keep many of the party faithful from realizing how deep that problem really is. To lose an election when the party base was charged up -- and turned out in massive numbers -- means that there simply aren't enough loyal Democrats to carry a Presidential candidate to victory. The last Democrat to reach 50% of the vote was Lyndon B. Johnson in 1964.</p>

In the intervening decades, the party's socially liberal standard-bearers have watched a steady erosion of support from voters who once made up the heart of the New Deal coalition: blue-collar, less educated, and rural whites. What's left is a bicoastal party that has an ever-more-difficult time competing in the industrial heartland and has collapsed in the South -- once the twin peaks of its power.

Continuing to wallow in nostalgia and trying to reassemble the New Deal coalition relegates Democrats to long-term minority status. "If there's a silver lining [in Kerry's defeat], it is that it's going to eliminate the ability [of Democrats] to argue that we have a natural majority on our side," says California venture capitalist Andrew S. Rappaport, a leading funder of Democratic causes. "We don't. It's over."

Changing the nomination process to reduce the power of interest groups might be a start. Although polls show that Democratic liberals are outnumbered by party moderates and conservatives, they dominate the primaries. In 2004, former Vermont Governor Howard Dean's unexpected surge as the candidate of the hard-core antiwar Left masked the fact that Dean's rivals were liberals, too -- just of a more pragmatic stripe.

THE IDEA GAP

Even retired General Wesley K. Clark, medals and all, ran as a down-the-line liberal. The only moderate in the nine-candidate field, Senator Joe Lieberman, failed to win a single primary.

Then there's the party's inability to come up with a lasting post-New Deal ideology. Bill Clinton's New Democrat formulation succeeded for eight years, but the past two nominees have diluted upbeat Clintonism with downbeat rhetoric, harping on tax cuts for the rich and scaring the elderly with warnings about Social Security privatization.

Both Gore and Kerry allowed Bush strategist Karl Rove to frame the 2000 and 2004 Presidential elections as contests between a future-oriented Republican who backed reforms of pensions and health care and a retro-liberal who promised to restore the Rust Belt, slow outsourcing, and put the engine of Big Government to work for the working class. Republicans once were the moss-backed defenders of the way things used to be. Nowadays, it's the Democrats who pine for yesteryear -- and their foes style themselves as New Economy visionaries.

A VALUES DIVIDE

Until Dems come up with a compelling call to modernity, they'll have trouble snagging enough suburban swing voters and urban investors to build an Electoral College majority. "The way for us to put together a winning coalition is to talk about big ideas, like Clinton did," says Al From, CEO of the centrist Democratic Leadership Council. "When we break up into constituency groups and try to piece together a coalition, it never works."

The biggest reason that the coalition won't jell: Democrats must come to grips with the reality that they are increasingly on the losing side of America's cultural divide. In this election, millions of blue-collar economic populists rejected a Massachusetts liberal because they felt he did not share their values on issues ranging from abortion to affirmative action, from guns to gay rights.

More than two-thirds of churchgoing Christians -- including millions who disapproved of the President's handling of the economy and the war in Iraq -- nevertheless voted for Bush. The cultural chasm cost Kerry dearly in states he badly needed to win, such as Missouri, Iowa, and West Virginia.

ATTACKS ON SERVICE.

Complicating Democratic comeback efforts is the specter of terrorism. For two elections -- in 2002 and 2004 -- Republicans have successfully used security fears to beat the opposition. The Democratic weak-on-terrorism label is a throwback to the Vietnam era and its aftermath, when the party was tagged as soft on defense.

With the fall of the Berlin Wall and the Soviet empire, Democrats thought they had escaped the old stereotype. But Bush effectively painted Kerry as an antidefense, anti-intelligence liberal trapped in a Sept. 10 mindset. The attacks on Kerry's Navy service and subsequent Vietnam protests by some Swift Boat veterans hurt him badly with blue-collar voters and military families. This occurred despite Kerry's vow to fight "a smarter war on terror."

Dems lost substantial ground among older men who remember the nuclear anxieties of the Cold War -- and also among anxious moms who fear attacks. "Voters have traditionally seen the Republican Party as strong on defense and strong on the projection of military force," says Republican pollster Tony Fabrizio. "It's going to take the Democrats time to neutralize that."

BEYOND THE BELTWAY

Whether the Democrats return to Clinton-style left-right fusion and embrace post-September 11 hawkishness in 2008 depends largely on the party's nominee. The two early favorites are Washington insiders with close ties to liberal constituency groups: New York Senator Hillary Clinton and defeated Vice-Presidential candidate John Edwards.

But if history is any guide, the party's path to victory could run through statehouses, where innovative governors such as New Mexico's Bill Richardson, Virginia's Mark Warner, and Iowa's Tom Vilsack are known to nurture White House ambitions.

The past two Democratic Presidents have been governors -- Southern governors, to be precise -- who bridged the nation's cultural divide. It'll take similar skills and experience for another Democrat to win. But without serious soul-searching about the changing electorate and unchanging verities of the primary process, the Dems are likely to play this tune again and again.

We can insist on pushing our candidates to stay on the far left, we can scream, we can throw tantrums, we can threaten to move to Canada, we can insist on intellect trumping emotion on the part of our candidates, and continue to lose election after election. Or we can acknowledge the reality that today's America is relatively conservative, values-driven and security-obsessed, fight the Republicans on that turf, and win.

This doesn't mean that Dems have to become anti-gay, anti-abortion, anti-environment, or pro-war. I think Mark Warner, governor of conservative Virginia, is an excellent example: he's centrist, pro-gay, pro-choice, and doesn't bend on his principles. He even managed to pass a tax increase through a conservative legislature in order to improve Virginia's balance sheet. Why is he so popular? He focuses on economic issues, he uses straight talk to speak to people's hearts about what's important, and he acknowledges the importance of values even if he respectfully disagrees with some of the positions of his constituents. Barack Obama used the same strategy to win over rural farmers in his own state of Illinois. Taking a conservative approach doesn't mean we give up our Democratic values; it means we give more time for society to be on the same page. Forty years ago, de-segregation was considered radical and extreme; today, even uber-conservative Strom Thurmond of South Carolina, chief architect of turning Dixiecrats into Republicans, acknowledged he'd been wrong to favor segregation before his death.

Are we going to learn how to win from winners, or keep losing by doing what we've always done? The choice is ours.