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"We ran a good campaign against a bad president, and we still got beat." -- Bruce Reed, president of the Democratic Leadership Council If the Democrats ran a good campaign, then I suggest that their definition of a campaign could be borrowed from The Devil's Dictionary . With apologies to Ambrose Bierce, I would say that definition is this: Presidential Campaign (n) - A process, starting about eighteen months prior to the election, by which the Democratic Party manages to alienate enough voters to hand victory to the other party. Reed and others suggest that the key to turning around...

WASHINGTON, D.C. -- One of the reasons I can say with the utmost confidence that the liberal Democrats are going to be out in the cold for a very long time has to do with a sociological observation. Almost no liberal Democrat knows a conservative Republican of whom he is not contemptuous. To be sure, liberals in their think tanks, their universities, their corporate offices or government bureaucracies encounter the occasional conservative. Doubtless over at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, many of the resident liberals knew that amiable moderate conservative former, Sen. Al Simpson. Many probably even liked him. Simpson...

The election campaign made it official. These are the Disunited States. There is "Red" America: conservative, Republican, religious. And there is "Blue" America: liberal, Democratic, secular. Everybody's message from the election results is that Red America won, and Blue America must change or die. It's a terrible exaggeration, of course. People have different mixes of values, and states have different mixes of people. Just for example, more than 50 million, or 44 percent, of the 115 million citizens who voted for either George W. Bush or John Kerry on Tuesday live in states that went for the other guy. These...