The meaning of defeat.

• Position: Comment

How agonizing it was to see George Bush gloat. Agonizing, no doubt, for John Kerry on a personal level, but profoundly more agonizing for his supporters and those on the left who threw in their lot with him in hopes of ridding the White House of the gang of reactionaries who took it over these last four years.

This was never about John Kerry.

It was always about the hope of establishing a semblance of sanity in our foreign policy, decency in social policy, and respect for the basic tenets of our democracy.

That's why virtually the entire left half of the spectrum--from DLC Democrats to radical intellectuals, from Joe Lieberman to Noam Chomsky--sided with Kerry. (Nader, as predicted here, was an asterisk of an asterisk.)

Even still, Bush prevailed, and we must examine why.

Part of the answer rests with Kerry himself.

While he had a good final month and performed well in the debates, he was a weak candidate overall. Remote in manner, convoluted in speech, he had anything but a common touch.

Compounding that, he squandered precious time after winning the nomination and foolishly flaunted his elitist credentials by going snowboarding in Utah and windsurfing off of Nantucket.

Amazingly, he failed to learn the lesson of the Dukakis campaign, which was to fire back immediately upon being attacked. Instead, Kerry for weeks failed to answer the slanders of the Swift Boaters.

On the Iraq War, his position was incoherent and disingenuous. He never explained adequately why he voted to authorize Bush to go to war in the first place, and for some baffling reason, he said he would still have done it again even knowing that Saddam Hussein had no weapons of mass destruction.

Then he delivered a huge present to the Bush campaign by making the ludicrous comment about being both for and against the $87 billion appropriation for the war.

Not until the last sixty days did he discover the argument he needed most: that the war on Iraq was making us less safe.

Kerry also played too nice.

At the Democratic Convention, he and other leading Democrats barely mentioned Bush's name at all. Or Cheney's, or Rumsfeld's, or Wolfowitz's, or Ashcroft's.

And the Kerry campaign never took Bush down two notches for being asleep at the wheel before 9/11.

You can bet the farm and all of Old McDonald's animals that Karl Rove would not have let such opportunities slide by.

In a pivotal election like this one, the candidate owes his supporters more discipline and more toughness.

Kerry...