Charlie Cook has some interesting insight that suggests the Democrats didn't do quite as bad as many others in the mainstream media might have you think.

As Democrats prepare to select a new party chairman next month, they should think not only about what went wrong in 2004 but about what went right. After all, a party that carried 19 states in four consecutive elections (with a total of 248 electoral votes, just 22 short of the 270 needed to win) is not fundamentally broken, it just needs some work. But for 118,599 votes out of the 5.6 million cast in Ohio and 119 million votes cast nationwide, a different half of America would be despondent today and another group of people would be headed to Washington to celebrate the presidential inauguration.

By taking a full assessment of their condition, Democrats are more likely to make the most needed changes without throwing out the baby with the bathwater.

[...]

No doubt a big part of the Democrats' problem has been in candidate selection. Given the narrowness of the Democrats' two losses in 2000 and 2004, one wonders how the party might have fared had they not nominated stiff, aloof candidates who would be uncomfortable at backyard barbecues in all but the very finest of homes. Nominating a candidate who was capable of saying that he voted for funding for the war before he voted against it -- a remark that Bush presidential adviser Karl Rove later said was "the gift that kept on giving" -- makes one wonder how a less flawed candidate might have fared.

[There's more, but you need to have the free subscription to view the rest. To sign up for Cook's Off to the Races column, click here.]

This is exactly how I view the past two elections, so it's great to see my opinion validated by the nation's top non-partisan political analyst. The fact is that the Democrats didn't get beaten by a wide margin; rather, the election was extremely close. Had the party nominated a candidate who didn't lack the ability to connect with the American people, the Dems would have won (and the Senate loss in the South would not have been nearly as acute).

Hopefully this meme begins to take hold across the nation so the Dems don't just think of themselves as perpetual losers for the next decade...