And how, exactly, are the Democrats supposed to counter this? Out-pander Karl Rove? Out-lie Dick Cheney? Out-fearmonger George Bush? Even if the Democrats were inclined to do all three -- and after this election, I'm betting they'd be willing to give it their best shot -- what are the odds, really, that they, or anybody, could succeed?

I'm not, by any means, saying that the Democrats made no mistakes in this race -- and some were huge. For one thing, the Swift Boat liars have been dogging Kerry since the Vietnam War was still underway -- John O'Neill was a protégé of Watergate felon Charles Colson -- and the Kerry campaign should have been ready to shoot down their smears from the moment they were launched. For another, they should have defined Kerry aggressively, with a huge media campaign, from the get-go -- the minute he nailed down the nomination in March -- and defined Bush on their terms at the same time. And they wasted way too much time on Florida, where the love is increasingly unrequited and the Bushes rule.

But to pretend that the Democrats are a bunch of effete, latte-drinking elitists who don't know how to connect with the "heartland" is not only hooey, but mindless, lazy, recycled hooey.

There is a name for the people the pundits describe -- and that name is "Nader voter." Democrats, by now, loathe these people even more than the folks in Idaho do. They're the overprivileged, Woodstock-era, insufferably smug liberals who think all the world's a poli-sci class and who'd rather be "right" than win. Especially since they're not the ones to feel the pain if the other guy wins. They cost Gore the White House in 2000, and the truly hardcore ones stuck to their "principles" even this year. They're repulsive. They're to be loathed and mocked to the skies. And they're not the people who were out there working day in and day out for John Kerry.

I spent the months leading up to the election calling people in swing states like Ohio and Pennsylvania. Many of them -- some Democrats, some Republicans, some with no party affiliation -- were also canvassing or leafleting for Kerry. They were teachers who had to buy their own supplies for their classrooms, because Bush underfunded No Child Left Behind. They were steelworkers who liked John Kerry's support of their unions. They were students struggling with tuition that had gone up 40 percent in a single year, because Bush's tax cuts to the wealthy had starved the states and localities. They were mothers with teenage sons who worried about Iraq. They were furloughed firefighters whose stationhouses had been temporarily closed due to budget cuts.

On Election Day, I was canvassing in Abington, Pa., with a group of volunteers so humongous that they had to bus us to another location -- and then to another -- just to find enough work for us all. If you'd plucked any 10 of us out of the crowd, we probably wouldn't have had much in common except our support for Kerry and our hope for a better, stronger country. The first person I commiserated with in my office the morning after the election was Alfred, our maintenance manager from Poland. And we weren't crying into lattes.

To me, the heartland of this country is anywhere that people work their asses off to make their lives better for their families. They stay true to their better angels no matter how miserable things get or how much easier it would be to succumb to hate and irrational fear. They read, and listen, and look for the truth and stay informed about what's really going on, no matter how grim the news. They don't live in Fox News cocoons, they don't blast Rush Limbaugh from their pickups, and they don't vote blindly for the guys whose prejudices most neatly line up with their own. Their concerns are genuine, their values are consistent, their principles are rock-solid, and their hearts are true.

They may not go around saying, "God bless America," but these days, they're probably praying that He'll save America. Because God knows the people in the "heartland" won't.

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