That’s right, they won.

And they won big.

No, it’s not just that Dems came within 3% of winning a very tough election. That alone is a very real and important accomplishment, but it’s not the key.

The real point is that if the Democrats are serious about the long-tem goal of building a broad and enduring democratic majority then getting 51% of the vote is not always the right test of a particular campaign’s success. Sometimes you have to lose an election to build the foundation for later victory.

Just ask the Conservative Republicans. They can recite you this lesson by heart. In every glowing account they write of their gradual rise to power they always point to Barry Goldwater’s unsuccessful 1964 campaign and Ronald Reagan’s 1976 bid for the Presidency (which did not get beyond the Republican primaries) as the pivotal campaigns that laid the foundations for all their subsequent victories.

And when you look at it from this point of view, the true scope, the genuinely impressive magnitude of the Democrats’ success this year can be expressed in a single sentence: In 2004 the Dems accomplished in 8 months what it took the Goldwater-Reagan conservative movement over a decade to achieve.

Last December, the Democratic party was internally divided, unsure about its message, uncertain how to talk about war and foreign affairs, financially dependent on donations from corporations and affluent donors and only beginning to build a grass-roots voter mobilization campaign. There was great anger and energy among the party’s core supporters, but it seemed extremely unlikely that the party as a whole would be able to agree upon a message, unite around a candidate and mount a serious challenge to a personally popular wartime president whose approval ratings hovered close to 60%.

Yet, by the time John Kerry addressed the Democratic convention in July, he was leading a political party that had become firmly united, was supported by new and powerful grass-roots mechanisms for fund raising and internet organizing (pioneered by Howard Dean and his supporters) and which was building a new voter mobilization network that was reconnecting the party with its political base.

Kerry and Edwards then provided the Democratic Party with a politically viable moderate-progressive message - one that had been eluding the party for years. In foreign affairs it combined basic patriotism and support for the troops with brutally sharp and honest criticism of the Administration’s disastrous foreign policy. In domestic affairs, it combined a cautious but sincere economic populism with greater fiscal responsibility then the Republican administration.

This political platform was sufficiently compelling to convince a large majority of those who watched the presidential debates that Kerry, not Bush, had been the victor of all three exchanges and to win him the support of a substantial majority of moderate and independent voters as well as his Democratic base.

Had the 2004 campaign halted at this point, the Kerry-Edwards campaign would have already accomplished more then the Goldwater-Reagan Republicans did from 1964 to 1976, but the campaign then pushed on to come within 3% of victory and a solid majority.

Sure, it was disappointing not to be able to snag those last few points, and the disappointment was compounded by the widespread feeling of optimism that lasted until the very last moments of election night.

But there is a vast difference between a vibrant and compelling campaign that doesn’t quite make it over the top and a campaign that is fundamentally a failure. The Dems have had more then a few of the latter kind, but 2004 wasn’t one of them.

“But we did worse then we did in 2000” people say, “We’re going backward, not forward”.

Nonsense. The truth is that in presidential elections the Democrats have basically been a minority party since 1968, when George Wallace cut deeply into the Dems blue-collar support in Michigan and the other industrial states as well as the South. In 1972, when the Republicans played the “Real Majority” vs. the “Elitists” game against the Dems for the first time, Nixon got 60% of the vote to McGovern’s 37%. Carter won a narrow victory in 1976 but look at the record since then.

Democrats never got anywhere even close to 50% of the vote until Clinton’s reelection campaign in 1996 (Clinton 49%, Dole/Perot 49%) and Gore’s 2000 run (Gore 48%, Bush 48%).

But in both of these latter campaigns the Democrats were running as incumbents or former Vice-Presidents, not as challengers. 2004 was the first time a Democrat ran as a challenger in more then a decade and Kerry faced a President who had, at the outset, high approval ratings, the patriotic fervor of an apparently successful war behind him, the overt support of one of the major TV networks, and the most extensive grass-roots voter mobilization the Republican Party had ever fielded.

And yet Kerry and Edwards came closer to unseating their opponent and closer to winning 50% of the vote then had any Democratic challengers in the last three decades.

A campaign like this simply can’t be considered a failure even by narrow electoral standards and the intangible benefits make it even less so. This political campaign made rank and file Democrats from every section of the party feel proud to be Democrats in a way they have not felt in decades. It displayed Democratic candidates who were decent, thoughtful and honorable men and offered a set of policies and positions that a wide range of Americans could accept as a solid framework and point of departure for the future. It showcased a political party that was systematically building the foundations for its future victory.

So shake off the disappointment and feel the sense of pride and accomplishment you deserve to feel instead.

The Dems lost an election. OK, it happens.

But the Dems haven’t been defeated, not at all.

They’ve just been slowed down.