The Wall Street Journal

Watching John Kerry deliver his statesmanlike concession at Faneuil Hall in Boston [Wednesday] -- and then watching his erstwhile spinners and boosters in the Democratic commentariat blame him for Tuesday's rout -- was like one of those nature shows in which the herd gives up its dying animal to the crocs so it can safely ford the stream. It may be expedient, but it also reflects the flaws of the species.

Mr. Kerry did not run a flawless campaign -- no one running for president ever does. But he ran an effective and energetic one that came about as close to scoring an electoral victory as his margin of popular defeat would allow. His handlers led him into a ditch with his convention focus on biography and Vietnam, yet the senator rescued himself in the first debate on foreign policy, the very one he was expected to lose.

And while President Bush sought constantly to sharpen his differences with Mr. Kerry, the senator largely succeeded in blurring them, turning an argument about ideology into one about competence.

Given the current parameters of Democratic orthodoxy and Mr. Kerry's sincerely held reservations about the use of force, it was the only thing he could do.

As it is, Mr. Kerry was not exactly the night's lonely Democratic loser. This is the third consecutive election in which the Democrats have lost to George Bush's Republicans (with each loss bigger than the last), and that is no accident. In part it has to do with the global zeitgeist, which plays to traditional Republican strengths on national security; in part with demographic shifts that tilt the electoral college Mr. Bush's way. It has still more to do with Mr. Bush's skill as a politician and boldness as a policy maker.

But let's be candid with our Democratic friends: On Tuesday, a majority of the American electorate took a look at their party and asked, "Who are these people?" Who are George Soros, Michael Moore, Tim Robbins, Susan Sontag, Teresa Heinz Kerry and all these other self-anointed spokespersons for everything good and true? And what does a party that is dominated by a loose coalition of the coastal intelligentsia, billionaires with too much spare time, the trial lawyers' association, the Hollywood Actors' Guild, rock stars and unionized labor have in common with what's quaintly known as Middle America?

The majority's answers were (a) not us; and (b) not a whole lot. Yet today, the Democratic Party not only suffers trial lawyers and other strange folk -- it puts them on the ticket. For a party that still reckons itself a national force, it is astonishing that Kerry-Edwards started out by simply yielding some 200 "red" electoral votes, or more than a third of the country.

It's true that the Bush campaign similarly wrote off big and mid-sized "blue" states such as California, New York, Maryland and Massachusetts. But at least Republicans own the governorships of all those states. When do the Democrats plan to be seriously competitive again in, say, Texas, Florida and Georgia?

Before Tuesday, the answer appeared to be never. Howard Dean did make primary appeals to the Dukes of Hazzard crowd (as he imagines it), but his was a lone voice.

This is a Democratic Party in which nostalgia for tradition is too often considered racism, opposition to gay marriage is bigotry, misgiving about abortion is misogyny, Christian fundamentalism is like Islamic fundamentalism, discussion about gender roles is sexism, and confidence in America's global purpose is cultural imperialism. To put it mildly, this is not the values system to which most Americans adhere.

Now, however, Democrats have an opportunity to reassess their attitudes. With luck, the election will finally have shattered the myth that Mr. Bush is a "selected," democratically illegitimate president. Democrats may also take the lesson that a political strategy which invites Americans to share in their contempt for the president's intelligence, moral values and religious beliefs -- basically, the Al Gore sighing technique writ large -- is not a winner. That's especially true when the president's intelligence, values and beliefs roughly coincide with those of middle Americans.

The person on whom the task of moral normalization may fall is Hillary Rodham Clinton, now the most prominent Democrat in the Senate and arguably the party's front-runner for president in 2008. It's true that it was during her husband's administration that today's great red-blue state cultural divide began to emerge. But she's shown remarkable discipline as a politician, and remarkable adaptability, too, as she has slowly turned herself into a hawk on national security since Sept. 11. That this task might now fall to her must surely have the gods smiling.