Response to Jeeni at CPR4Democracy

Jeeni,

It was a failure of intelligence and planning. The people we trusted to know the struggle completely missed the evangelicals. It wasn't just missing the people, it was missing the zeitgeist, and not having a successful plan to counter the arguments. We let moral values be defined by gay bashing and abortion, not by charity and faith and true devotion to life (stem cell research, death penalties and illegal war).In the coming weeks, we will hear calls to cut loose part of our group. We'll hear that the gays cost us the election -- gay Americans didn't cost us the election, gay hating Americans cost us the election. Take that same analysis to any discussion, and you'll see that it's not us, it's them. And we need to change them, not lose ourselves.

What's next? We need to select a Democratic leader with a vision without being concerned about 'electability' -- that's the least of our concerns for the next two years. Neither Gandhi or Mandela were 'electable' but they profoundly changed the world. Let's look at Howard Dean, Dennis Kuchinich, Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and whomever else you can think of.