History lessons for Democrats

Arianna Huffington tries to put things in perspective, taking us back in time to 1992:

In 1992, the Republican Party found itself in very much the same position as Democrats do today: out of power (with the opposition controlling the White House and both houses of Congress), lacking a compelling core message, and facing the prospect of becoming what any number of pundits at the time deemed – all together now – "a permanent minority party."

Indeed, reading the post-mortems of the 1992 election is like coming across the original template for the post-mortems of the 2004 election. If you take away the names, you would swear that the Republican quotes from back then were being delivered by the Democrats from right now.

In twelve years, the GOP went from minority nothingness to the party in complete power. Even though the media and the left sounded the death knell for the relevance of the Republican party, they overcame and now have the Democrats in the exact same position.

Keep in perspective always that Kerry lost by 3 percentage points to a wartime President up for reelection. For Kerry to come that close shows signs that the Democratic party actually accomplished quite a bit this election cycle. We lost Senate seats in tight races, showing ourselves very competitive in red states like South Dakota, Colorado and Alaska. We won a seat in Colorado. We lost seats in the House to constitutionally fuzzy redistricting. Things really didn't go that bad.

That said, new ideas and pushing the Democratic image forward from here is still very important. And I agree with a number of the changes that Arianna suggests, including finding better candidates to run.

It's a shame Democrats didn't work this hard when we were in power to keep our image strong. Hopefully we have learned our lessons well.