Grabbing the fringe unravels dems: the democrats encouraged the extremism of filmmaker Michael Moore.

I read them so you don't have to--all the words explaining how John Kerry and the Democratic Party lost the election and how, with a clip-clip here and a snip-snip there, the Democrats can win again (minus John Kerry, of course).

After all, while President Bush rang up a record total in the popular vote, so did Kerry, winning more votes than any presidential challenger in history. He won roughly 5 million more than Vice President Al Gore in 2000 and 2 million more than Ronald Reagan in his thunderous landslide re-election in 1984.

But for Democrats, the most ominous statistic from Bush's victory is this: The president increased his percentage of the vote in 2000 in 45 out of 50 states.

Under Bush, in other words, not only are the Republican red states getting redder, the Democratic blue states are turning a distinct shade of purple. Or mauve. Whatever.

So let's stipulate that Democrats are ripe for soul-searching. Unfortunately, it turns out they're no better at self-criticism than they are at winning national elections.

The most popular of the various self-improvement programs is a crash course in learning to be religious--or in learning to talk as though they are. Asked to name the political issue most important to them, 22 percent of voters--the largest category--named "moral values." Eighty percent of those voters went for Bush, 18 percent for Kerry.

Yet these Democrats who call for a tent revival have short memories: During the campaign, their man Kerry did deploy the language of religion in service of his politics. And he wasn't subtle about it, either.

Several Sundays this fall he ascended the pulpit in inner-city churches and preached on the New Testament's Letter of St. James, where we are taught that faith without works is dead. In the Kerry translation, "works" apparently meant "government interventions in the marketplace."

And in a dazzling overreach, Kerry compared Bush with the priest and the Levite in the Good Samaritan story, both of whom selfishly declined to help an injured traveler on the highway. "This president has talked about compassion, but he's walked right by," Kerry said.

So far as I know, not since William Jennings Bryan in 1896 has a major presidential candidate had the brass to call his opponent a Pharisee. It didn't work for Bryan either.

No, Democrats must look elsewhere to reform their party. How about in the mirror? There they will see an out-sized body mass sprawling across the background, belonging to the filmmaker Michael Moore.

Every party has wackos and extremists in its ranks; they're an inevitable hazard of coalition-building. But Republicans know how to keep their extremists happy--and quiet.

Yet this year, when Democrats were faced with a genuine extremist like Moore--whose hugely popular documentary "Fahrenheit 9/11" was a catalog of wild-eyed allegations against Bush--they encouraged him.

In place of braiding a convincing critique of the Bush presidency, the party absorbed Moore's bizarre obsessions: over Bush's National Guard record, for instance, which most voters deemed beside the point.

Perhaps Democrats thought they were bringing Moore into the mainstream; instead, he brought them to the radical fringe. I'm not sure whether a showman like Moore can ever be hushed in the way Republicans have managed to stifle their own wackos. But Democrats need to try.

Otherwise they face the truth of a favorite red-state axiom: "You lie down with dogs, you get up with fleas." And fleas don't vote.

Andrew Ferguson is a columnist with Bloomberg News.