From the American Prospect.

Any number of people like this are going to blame the Democrat's loss on their "abandonment" of their Great Marxist Ideals. I have no idea if the Democratic Party is going to buy this or not.

...On what should have been the Democrats' defining issues, they endeavored to be indistinct. They could never bring themselves to oppose Bush's tax cut, his trillion-dollar handout to the rich, though that made it impossible for them to advocate any significant programs of their own. Nor could they bring themselves to oppose the White House's headlong charge into Iraq, though polling showed over two-thirds of the American people oppose a unilateral war. So Missouri's Jean Carnahan, Colorado's Tom Strickland, New Hampshire's Jeanne Shaheen and Georgia's Max Cleland -- Democratic Senate candidates in close races -- backed the president. All of them lost.

We'll let slide that little word "unilateral," which allows him to use that particular statistic. Support for a war that is not "unilateral" is considerably stronger. Note also the assumption that the defeat of these candidates is related to their support for Bush. Is there any evidence of this? It's possible that had they not supported Bush, their defeats would have been greater. Of course, there's no evidence for that either.

From one end of the country to the other, the Democrats had nothing to say. And the nation will suffer for their silence. It will suffer in all the rightwing judicial appointments that will be ratified, for the Supreme Court on down, now that the Republicans control the Senate. It will suffer in the lack of scrutiny that the administration will receive now that the Democrats control no committees. Only the filibuster now stands between the nation and the unchecked rule of the most rightwing, xenophobic and belligerent administration in the nation's history.

The nation's history? Didn't you socialist boobs say exactly the same thing about every single Republican administration in your lifetimes? Is Bush more rightwing than Reagan was? Really? Can I get that in writing?

The writer has a point: The Democrats didn't get a message across. But you see, that's the Catch-22.

The core philosophy of the Democratic Party is socialism, or Marxism. At bottom, that's their message. To come right out promoting this would mean their instant extinction as a party. So, their success depends precisely on their consituents NOT understanding their principles down to the core. Clarity is their enemy. Obscurity is their friend. Verbal fog, platitudes, and circling around issues is the only thing that can work. When this fails, they are stuck with simply pointing out how rotten their opponents are. There are maybe a dozen Democratic leaders who understand their own roots. Most Democratic politicians don't, but go along with the program anyway based on inertia, emotional reasons, or just Not Being Republican.