While they're waiting ... Thoughts for the Democrats after their recent losses.

EVER since the election, Democrats have been consoling themselves with the thought that they lost by only 2.5 points nationally, and by only 119,000 votes in Ohio. Forty-eight percent of voters picked John Kerry. It would take only a little bit more support, they tell themselves, to regain power. And this is true. But there's another way of looking at the same facts: It means that the Democrats still have a long way to fall.

It is understandable that Democrats would concentrate on which bits of red territory they could raid: on how they could win over voters in Colorado or Nevada, in the exurbs or the churches. But it's not as though Republicans are going to stand in place while the Democrats maneuver. Republicans could gain votes in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, among Catholics and Hispanics. And maybe the most hopeful sign for the Republicans since the election has been the parade of dubious Democratic theories about how to make a comeback.

Leading this parade is the view that the Democrats simply nominated a weak, uncharismatic candidate this time around, and will succeed if they choose better next time. No reasonable observer would deny that there is an element of truth to this explanation. But what were the alternatives? Howard Dean would hardly have improved the Democrats' standing on national-security or cultural issues. Dick Gephardt looked like a strong candidate on paper, but was unable to ride the labor unions to victory even in the caucuses of his nextdoor neighbor Iowa. Joe Lieberman, if nominated, would have generated a 10 percent vote for Ralph Nader. Arealistic Democrat has to look behind Kerry to ask why his party was unable to come up with strong candidates for 2004.

Another theory, popular just after the election, held that the Democrats had to reach out to "voters of faith." This way of putting things is probably self-defeating: For many Christians-and nobody is under the impression that Democrats have a pressing need to reach out to Jews, Muslims, or Hindus-the phrase "people of faith" is a tip-off that the speaker is approaching them as an anthropologist rather than as a fellow citizen.

But terminology is the least of it. The base of the Democratic party does not allow its politicians much room to appeal to religious and social conservatives. Kerry tried just about everything that could be done rhetorically to do so. He downplayed his views on abortion-neither Edwards nor he mentioned it at the Democratic convention, a departure from the practice of the previous three elections. Kerry came out against same-sex marriage, even endorsing state initiatives to block it. Nor did he eschew the use of Biblical allusions in his speeches. (He suggested that Bush was a Pharisee.) If rhetoric alone were going to change the impression that traditionally minded Christians have of the Democrats, it would have happened.

Taking different positions, on the other hand, might change that impression. Democrats could nominate for president someone like Evan Bayh, who opposes partial-birth abortion. But feminists (and the Supreme Court) regard partial-birth abortion as part and parcel of Roe, and have blocked Bayh from getting even a vice-presidential nomination. Social-issue liberalism is central to the identity of large numbers of Democratic voters. They are not likely to tolerate any serious turn to the right on social issues.

Some liberals argue that instead of moving right on social issues, the Democrats should move left on economics. On this theory, white working-class voters would not be attracted to the Republicans on cultural issues if Democrats were offering them tangible benefits. These voters have suffered from years of economic decline. If Democrats do not give them hope, they will lash out at gays, blacks, and Hollywood. Howard Dean took up this analysis during the primaries, arguing that national health insurance would trump "guns, God, and gays" among southerners with Confederate flags in their pickup trucks.

The flaw in this theory is the possibility that when voters say that their top concern is the country's moral decline, they may not be expressing a submerged rage at their economic circumstances. It may be that their top concern is moral decline.

Moving left on economics also carries real costs. Hardening Democratic opposition to free trade is already risking a reduction in the party's support from Wall Street and some business lobbies. If the party loses its reputation for sobriety and respectability on economic issues, it could start losing voters in the suburbs as well as campaign donations.

Those Democrats who want their party to embrace a more muscular foreign policy have a stronger case than the factions considered so far. If they prevail, on-the-fence voters will worry less about the Democrats' impact on national security. And it is possible to imagine enough liberal voters' reconciling themselves to hawkishness over the next four years to make this idea practicable. It is, at least, more possible than it is to imagine liberal voters' moving right on social issues.

Unless, that is, controversial foreign-policy initiatives have become inseparable from the culture wars. During the last nine presidential elections, Democrats have run hawkish candidates three times-in 1992, 1996, and 2000. It cannot be a coincidence that these were the three elections of those nine in which foreign-policy issues were least important, and in which people felt least threatened by foreigners.

This pattern suggests a very dispiriting possibility for Democrats. It may be that when national-security issues become prominent, two things happen. A majority of the public becomes hawkish. And most liberals have an equal and opposite reaction. If that is true, it is bad news for the hawkish Democrats who want their party to commit itself to winning the War on Terror just as Harry Truman committed it to the Cold War. It is bad news because it means that the political reflexes of modern Democrats are those of the second half of the Cold War, during which a relatively dovish party lost four of five presidential elections.

The hawkish Democrats' best chance of winning, then, is if foreign-policy issues recede in importance. A makeover of the party, in other words, is most likely when it is least needed. The interests of the hawkish Democrats thus turn out to be the same as the wish of the majority of their party: that the war and the terrorists would just go away on their own. Then we could return to a politics in which the top issue is keeping the price of medicine down.

The Democrats' other great wish is that Republicans will commit some massive political blunder that will allow them to regain power without adjusting their views on anything. It is certainly possible that Republicans will oblige by overreaching on Social Security or tax reform, or fighting one another about immigration, or allowing power to corrupt them. Some Democrats, and even more journalists, have pointed out that second terms are often plagued by damaging scandals.

That is a false comfort for Democrats. The data points used to bolster that theory-Watergate, Iran-contra, impeachment -all unfolded when the president faced a Congress of the other party. That situation does not obtain today. Nor is it likely to obtain after the midterm elections of 2006. Democrats have 18 Senate seats up to the Republicans' 15. To regain power, they would have to hold all of their seats while winning two-fifths of the Republicans'. It is possible, but it is not the way to bet.

There is a sliver of truth lurking in here, however, that could prove important. With Republicans holding the White House and Congress, the time would appear to be ripe for Democrats to indulge in some anti-Washington populism. Thus far, Democrats have been curiously unwilling to present their complaints about deficits, health care, and other issues as part of "the mess in D.C." It may be that many of them still see attacking the Beltway as fouling their own nest. Surely by 2008, that will have changed.

On the other hand, the Democrats did not learn much from the last electoral drubbing, in 2002. The polls that November were not ambiguous: Democrats trailed Republicans by 30 points on national security. Yet the Democrats somehow decided that their mistake had been not being sufficiently opposed, or loud in their opposition, to Bush's foreign policy. House Democrats chose Nancy Pelosi as their leader. Howard Dean set the tone for their presidential field.

In recent months, Democrats have become fond of calling themselves members of "the reality-based community." The reference is to a comment by an anonymous White House aide in a Bushbashing New York Times Magazine story. But the liberal bloggers who have adopted this motto have missed the point of the comment. The aide was saying, inartfully, that liberals merely analyzed the world while conservatives were changing it--and liberals would be left simply adjusting to new realities.

Watching the Democrats try out their various theories as to how they will return to power, one is struck above all by the sheer passivity of it all. Democrats are waiting for a charismatic leader to emerge, for Republicans to stumble, for the dollar's decline to cause an economic crisis, for demographic trends to carry them to victory. Patience, it turns out, is one of the liberal virtues. And the art of losing isn't hard to master.