Democrats, however, offer no moral vision -- or at least they don't tell a moral story. This is why, even though they act in the interests of ordinary Americans far more than the Republicans do, they don't appeal to them.

The last time the Democratic Party had a clear vision was LBJ's war on poverty, which appealed to the Good Samaritan principle and trounced Goldwater while doing so. But the Republicans learned from Goldwater, developing a powerful strategic machine and coming up with a vision of their own. Democrats haven't had a sellable vision or a winnable strategy since LBJ. The Clinton campaign saw this, and had to script one on its own. The Dems' 2004 "vision," despite all the campaign slogans to the contrary, was Anything But Bush. And our strategy wasn't, "It's the economy, stupid" or even, "It's Iraq, stupid," but rather, "Isn't Bush stupid?" That was our "vision."

The Democrats' biggest foe isn't conservatives, or the religious right, but their deep, ingrained assumption that human rationality will win the day over human nature. Black Democratic leaders know better: They've always galvanized support by appealing to their largely religious black base, recognizing that you can't use a rational message to convert the masses without first appealing to their guts and heart. White operatives in the party never have a problem with winning black constituencies this way come election time, and yet, when it comes to the rest of the electorate, somehow different rules apply. Segregation at its liberal best. Everyone patted Barack Obama on the back for delivering a great speech at the DNC, but no one congratulated him for doing the near impossible: Expressing the emotional, moral and -- yes -- spiritual heart of the Democratic Party.

In so many ways, the Democrats did a great job this year. We were out there, we got people registered, we canvassed swing states and we canvassed some more. The foot soldiers did a great job. Hell, Kerry did a good -- not great -- job. But in the end, we still left religious Democrats like my mother in a bind. She saw that the Democrats were losing the battle to the religious right, but felt she had no support in combating their rhetoric. The grass-roots Republicans were equipped with talking points from the GOP, but all she had was a do-it-yourself message. The GOP had its church arm put out 12,000 copies of "Inner Strength," a hagiographic documentary about Bush and his religious faith, with distribution centered in Ohio and Pennsylvania. You might counter that we had "Fahrenheit 9/11," but that's not the sort of movie my mother is going to take her Sunday school class to see, whereas I bet plenty of Sunday school classes in Ohio were corralled into church basements to watch "Inner Strength."

Despite my mother's personal beliefs about abortion or gay marriage, she remains a Democrat, and, being newly retired, she did as much for the cause as she could. Yet she was frustrated at every turn by the lack of support and infrastructure for religious lefties to engage in community outreach -- a practice that not only might have swung the election to Kerry, but that saves both religion and politics from fanaticism.

My husband, an avid fisherman who occasionally hunts, suffers from a similar dilemma. When he goes fishing, he's often the only Democrat on the boat, and he tries to appeal to his fellow fisherman by telling them that the Democrats are actually better for the health of the oceans, but many of them are already convinced that the Sierra Club and PETA want to restrict a sportsman's ability to harvest fish or hunt. By the time he gets on a boat, his fellow fishermen already fear the Sierra Club more than Exxon because the GOP has effectively driven a wedge between the environmentalists and the conservationists, with the Dems doing little to stop them. People like my mother and my husband are in regular contact with the voters we need, and yet they feel like outsiders in their own party. They are the ones who get laughed at when Kerry goes on a last-minute goose hunting expedition or attends four church services in one day.

What we Democrats need is our own political brand of evangelism. The conservatives have a well-wrought message, but no works. We have the substantive works, but no message, and certainly no overarching vision. We are the ones with the easier task before us, but we can't rely on the elite activists in the party to do the job of conversion; these people simply don't speak the language. Religious Democrats do. But we shouldn't use them in a Democratic-Republican game of keeping up with the Joneses; we should embrace them for a much better reason -- because they, ironically enough, are the only ones in the Democratic universe who won't simply preach to the choir. But they need a vision to preach, and they need support from the party they believe in, despite mounting evidence that their party doesn't believe in them. We can't leave them out there, alone and alienated in the red states we're now so fond of bashing, or else we'll lose them as well.

When my mother talks of winning over the hearts and minds of others, she always refers to the "fish and loaves" approach -- alluding to how Jesus fed the masses fish and bread before delivering his sermon. For the rest of us secular folks, I'll employ another metaphor. Give the dog a bone. Then maybe he'll join you the next time you go a-huntin'.

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