Nearly a month has gone by since John Kerry did something great for this country: He lost the election and admitted it. Listening to his concession speech, he was so much greater, more majestic and even classier than he seemed before. If only the rest of the Democratic Party could follow his example.

John Kerry in his concession speech told the world of his conversation with President Bush on election day and expressed his wish for a bipartisan country. Will the real John Kerry please stand up! Then, not even two weeks later, the defeated democratic challenger responded to a question posed by Fox News Reporter Geraldo Rivera about why he lost:

“It was that Osama tape, it scared them [the American people],” he said.

Message: The American People are gullible twits, too scared of their own shadows to stand up to Osama bin Laden. And did I mention that I served in Vietnam?  It was the John Kerry I had seen for the past year, back in black.

For months, the democratic demagogues both in Washington and the press had lodged a sustained carpet bomb-style assault on both President Bush’s policies and even his character. MoveOn.org likened him to Hitler, and Michael Moore and the Hollywood crap machine churned out propaganda so vile it would make Lenny Riefenstahl shake her head in disgust. Teddy Kennedy and Terry McAuliffe, the tag team of trash talk, have yelled so hard and so long that President Bush is a liar that their lungs now have the capacity to sustain each of them during the next Boston Marathon. Surely, they thought, their campaign of smear and fear would be enough to pull Kerry past the finish line. After all, the war in Iraq is so bad. One thousand soldiers have died and we are still there. It’s been a year and a half and we haven’t built Iraq into the land of milk and honey! Osama bin Laden is still on the loose, he isn’t weighted down by chains in a dungeon or being flogged by angry soldiers with wet, rolled-up American flags.

And what about Bush’s pathetic domestic policies? The Kerry campaign hammered for months that Bush had turned America into some sort of wasteland and with confidence bordering on arrogance, thought that they somehow convinced all Americans to believe that the economy was the worst since the Great Depression and that President Bush has lost more jobs than Herbert Hoover. Kerry and clan thought they convinced everyone that Bush wants to have state-sanctioned gay stompings in the streets and that a Bush victory would mean a return to slavery for blacks. They thought they had convinced parents that their kids are getting dumber by the second and that Bush has bankrupted the education system. And for some reason, they believed they had convinced the primarily Christian population of this country that somehow Bush’s personal faith in God is a weakness that should be laughed at in the halls of Congress and the streets of capitols around the world.

John Kerry thought that he had convinced the youth of the country that they would be torn away from their mommies and daddies and be shipped off to Iraq with nothing but a musket and a pat on the back if the president were re-elected; and John Edwards was confident in saying that if they were in office now instead of the Republicans, Christopher Reeve would not only have lived but would be doing a foxtrot with Michael J. Fox at the Kerry victory rally.

So what went wrong? They had more money than they ever had. They had Hollywood with Susan Sarandon, Ben Affleck, and Leonardo DiCaprio planting yard signs and giving speeches. They had Michael Moore and Robert Redford making and airing every hate-Bush movie ever made. They had scores of books, tons of magazines, and newspapers. They had the music industry, MTV, and even the Boss himself, Bruce Springstein, touring with Kerry like he was a rock star to get the vote out. They had the billions of George Soros and his wife’s ketchup empire, and the support of the Canadians, the French, and the Germans. So why did it all go wrong? It went wrong because the American people can’t be bought. It went wrong because the American people cannot be tricked. It went wrong because although Democrats seem to think anybody who believes in God deserves a seat on the short bus, they continue year after year to forget that the majority of this country believes in God. They continue to forget that the American people, like Leonardo DiCaprio in Titanic at the bottom of the Atlantic, are not in politics. They forget that people want the news, not what certain people think is the news, and that The New York Times somehow forgot how to be The New York Times. And they forget that Americans love the fact that Bruce
Springstein was “born in the USA,” but also love the fact that he doesn’t run the USA.  

The Democrats cry every year that the Republican campaign machine makes issues out of the same things every year: God, gays, guns, and government interference. The problem is that Democrats never seem to get hip to the fact that Republicans aren’t making these things the issues, but that they ARE the issues. They reflect the concerns and the character of the people, of the people! So until Democrats finally do get the idea that Americans care more about America than they do with the issues of self-interest that Democrats think that they should, it would behoove the left to learn how to lose more graciously.