A time for boldness.

• Position: Comment

November 5 left the landscape barren. The Democrats managed to lose the Senate, and they even dropped seats in the House. Now the Republicans will have their way. They will be in a position to clog the benches with rightwing judges, cement President Bush's retrograde tax cuts, and roll back environmental, labor, and a host of other protections.

This election was a referendum not so much on George W. Bush but on the Democratic Party leadership and vision--or lack of both. The party had no message and no messenger. After ten years of steering by the Democratic Leadership Council, the party finally hit the brick wall at the back of that dead end.

Democrats had tremendous advantages, which they squandered.

History was on their side, since the President's party almost always loses seats in mid-term elections.

The economy was on their side, with the stock market tanking and unemployment rising.

The Wall Street scandals--Enron, Harken, Halliburton, et al.--were on their side, and these scandals continued to cascade right up to election day.

The mood of the nation was on their side, with a sizable chunk of Americans saying the country was headed in the wrong direction.

But still the Democrats could not make the sale. They couldn't sell mosquito repellent in Louisiana.

Sure, Bush played the war card; what other card did he have available? And yes, it was shrewd, if astonishingly crass, for Karl Rove and Bush to play up the war against Iraq so as to shift people's attention away from the economy and the Wall Street scandals to the Iraq war and terrorism.

"The Republican strategy was rather brilliant, a combination of cross-dressing and saber rattling," says Robert Borosage, co-director of the Campaign for America's Future, based in Washington, D.C. "They took domestic issues, like prescription drugs, and pretended they were reformers, and then they used the war to mobilize their base and divide ours."

Yet the Democrats let them get away with it.

"The problem for Democrats was they aided and abetted the Republicans in blurring domestic issues," Borosage says. "There was an unwillingness to put forth a serious alternative. They couldn't agree to take on the drug companies. They couldn't agree on serious pension reforms. And their most telling mistake was--after getting the war issue behind them so as to focus people's attention on the economy--failing then to tell people what Democrats could do to turn the economy around. All the Democrats did was say...