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Because the election was so close and because the war in Iraq and loathing of Bush were the chief propellants fueling the Democrats' campaign, party professionals and activists seem disinclined to engage in much self-criticism while Bush remains in the White House. "The threat posed by Bush unified the party," says Robert Borosage, co-director of Campaign for America's Future, a liberal advocacy group. "And he'll continue to unify Democrats in a second term." It was the willingness of Dean and progressive organizations like MoveOn.org to attack the Republican President and his policies directly, adds Borosage, that "gave the Democratic Party its voice and its will to win. The progressives come out of this emboldened by what they were able to do. They feel like they have the power to change politics."
The capacity of independent nonparty organizations like MoveOn, Americans Coming Together and the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now to raise money and mobilize anti-Bush voters has acted like a fresh rain on the Democratic Party's parched grass roots. Even though the Democratic candidate lost, the party and the broader network of liberal, anti-Bush organizations succeeded in raising record sums of money and enlisting unprecedented numbers of volunteers. Far from being distraught and depressed by the election, the way they were after 2000, many Democrats sound surprisingly upbeat about the future.
"If there is some upside to people's lack of passion for Kerry, it's that this campaign was all about a struggle for a fundamentally different direction for the country from where the conservatives are taking it," says John Podesta, a former Clinton White House chief of staff who last year launched a progressive think tank, the Center for American Progress, modeled on the successful think tanks created around the conservative movement in the 1970s and '80s. "When a campaign is about the person, in defeat the whole thing collapses. That's not going to happen because this feels more like movement politics."
And instead of harping on what Ruy Teixeira, co-author of The Emerging Democratic Majority, calls "the same debate Democrats have been having for 20 years--should we be more populist or more centrist?"--activists from various factions may focus on working together against a common enemy. "Just because they lost, these people are not going to be any more disposed toward the Republican Party," says Teixeira. "We're seeing the emergence of a new Democratic Party. It's more pragmatic and less ideological. And it's unified in its desire to defeat a Republican Party that's widely viewed as stopping at nothing to crush the opposition."