First off, it's not over yet. But if we have lost, I will not blame Kerry. Whether or not he was an ideal candidate is beside the point. He was a perfectly fine candidate: we should not need a Messiah to win.
The fact is, we have a reality problem, not a candidate problem. In a political culture where those who oppose the president's policies can be called traitors, where it's considered acceptable to vote for President based on who you'd rather have a beer with, where the media treat the election of our government as equivilant to a celebrity bag race, where the common belief that Bush was chosen by God is not seriously examined in mainstream discourse, in all of this . . . we have a reality problem.
Whomever the Democrats nominated would have faced the same serious problem with the American reality (or rather, the American unreality). But we are going to be subjected now to a litany of explainations of how Kerry didn't measure up: he was too cautious, too aloof, too tall, whatever. But keep this in mind:
As long as we are talking about personality, we are losing.
The media and the Republicans would love for the campaign postmortem to be focused on the person of John Kerry. Because if we are talking about what's wrong with John Kerry, we are not talking about what's wrong with the media and the Republicans and American political culture. We are fighting on their turf.
Face it: Bush is no Jack Kennedy (and hell, even Jack Kennedy barely beat Nixon). But today he is the conquering hero. Not because he was a better candidate than Kerry, but because the underlying American political reality is skewed to his advantage.
This is not about candidates. This is about America. And in America, we have work to do: changing frames, challenging the Republicans, moving the boundaries of what is normal and acceptable in American discourse and politics. And if we do that work well, then in four years or eight years we can nominate Pee-Wee Herman and still win.
Let's get to work.