"Houston, We Have a Problem"

When astronaut Jim Lovell uttered those words from Apollo 13, it was one of the great understatements of American history. An explosion had ruptured an oxygen tank. The spacecraft was essentially rudderless, the crew without a road map to get back on track. As Lovell described it, "Our normal supply of electricity, light, and water was lost, and we were about two hundred thousand miles from Earth."

The skinny guys in the skinny ties back at NASA knew this was most definitely a problem. And that's what made them different from the Democratic Party at the dawn of the twenty-first century.

There are still several leading Democrats who think we don't have a problem. They look at the 2000 election and point out that Al Gore won. We agree, he did—and not just the popular vote. A sensible examination of the ballots in Florida shows that Gore carried that state, and therefore the electoral college.

But in the zeal to blame Ralph Nader and Katherine Harris and Chief Justice Rehnquist, Democrats (including us) failed to ask the bigger question: How could the incumbent party, running in a time of peace and prosperity, make the election close enough for the Republicans to steal?

If 2000 should have been a wake-up call, 2004 was an old-fashioned ass-kicking. And yet, say the "No Problem" Democrats, we almost won. We won the moderate vote, they say. We won the independent vote, they say. And if you add up the totals in the eighteen battleground states, apparently we won them, too. Moreover, if just sixty thousand people in Ohio (fewer than turn out for an Ohio State game) had switched sides, Senator John Kerry would be President John Kerry.

The only thing is: We lost the White House. As Casey Stengel said, "You could look it up."

This bizarre logic is like us telling our wives that if they take out their contacts, squint their eyes real tight, cock their heads, and turn off the lights, we look like George Clooney and Brad Pitt. You can do that, but it doesn't make us actually look like Clooney and Pitt.

Now open your eyes, put your contacts back in, and look at the reality. We're realists, so we know how bleak things have gotten for the Democrats of late. John Kerry's defeat at the hands of George W. Bush was a calamity for our nation and the world. But it was also a symptom of the catastrophe that has befallen the party we love. Not only did George W. Bush win on November 2, 2004, so did the Republican candidate for Senate in Oklahoma, Tom Coburn, who called for the death penalty for doctors who perform abortions. He also called his state's legislators "crapheads." And he decried "rampant lesbianism" in Oklahoma schools. He won. By 12 percent. Against Democratic congressman Brad Carson, who is a Rhodes Scholar, a former Defense Department official, and a member in good standing of the First Baptist Church of Claremore, Oklahoma—not exactly a dangerous extremist.

Perhaps worse, if that's possible, Jim Bunning won. The Hall of Fame pitcher with the Detroit Tigers and the Philadelphia Phillies went from being a reliable right-hander to being a flaky ultra-right-winger. He said his opponent, a respected physician named Daniel Mongiardo, looked like one of Saddam Hussein's sons. Bunning also claimed that Mongiardo, or Mongiardo's staff, roughed up his wife—with no evidence to back it up. And after promising to debate Mongiardo, Bunning refused to show up, preferring instead to debate via satellite from Washington with the aid of a teleprompter. Bunning, who isn't recognized as a senator even when he's in the halls of the Capitol, said he needed a large security detail to protect him from al Qaeda terrorists. "There may be strangers among us," he murmured darkly to a Paducah, Kentucky, television station. It got so bad that Louisville's Courier-Journal hinted at mental illness: "Is his increasing belligerence an indication of something worse? Has Sen. Bunning drifted into territory that indicates a serious health concern?"

And Bunning won. You know what that means? We couldn't beat an alleged nutcase in a swing state.

Or take Jim DeMint, who ran for Senate calling for a 23 percent national sales tax to replace the income tax. And he said gays and pregnant women with live-in boyfriends should be banned from teaching. Of course, since he also supported outlawing abortion, DeMint's plan would put a pregnant, unwed teacher in a hell of a bind. In DeMint's world, she couldn't have the baby—she'd lose her job for being pregnant. And she couldn't have an abortion—she'd go to jail.

DeMint won. Against the popular and successful state education commissioner, Inez Tanenbaum.

We point out these victorious Republican wack jobs not to depress you, nor to amuse you. We do so to alarm you. If we can't beat these clowns, we ought to find another country to run in.

And yet we couldn't beat them.

Not because we didn't have good candidates; Carson, Mongiardo, and Tennenbaum are high-quality people who would have excelled in the Senate. Rather, we lost because, as corporate marketers would say, there's something wrong with Brand D. Brand R is strong enough to sustain even weak candidates, while Brand D is so weak even a good candidate can't win with it in a tough state.

You can blame John Kerry if it makes you feel better. But the problem is much bigger than one candidate in one campaign. The problem, in part, is that on some important issues, people think Democrats are out of step with the mainstream. But the bigger problem is that people don't know what it is the party stands for. That's a problem we must solve.

It's high time—indeed, past time—for Democrats to take back the country. Democrats in the post-Clinton era have come to be a modern-day Mount Losemore, and yet, despite the failings of the past, they are positioned for a comeback. We believe that if Democrats think a little more and fight a lot more, they can be the dominant party in American politics once again—and deep into the twenty-first century.

Some of the keys to taking back power are tactical. Some of them are cultural. But most of them are existential. Democrats must say loud and clear what it is they believe in. If we want to take our country back, we must first take our party back—back from the mushy-spined mealy-mouthed wimps; back from the Pollyannas who deny there's a problem; back from the accommodationists who think being a lighter shade of Republican is the key to survival.

While we mourn the loss of House and Senate seats, the White House has always been the big enchilada of American politics. So take a look at the presidential map from 2004. The Kerry-Edwards ticket lost the entire South, most of the Midwest, and all of the Rocky Mountain States. They carried only eight states outside the Northeast.

Copyright ©2006 by James Carville and Paul Begala.