All Of The Above

When Democrats win elections, the press simply moves on. Does anybody remember any post-mortems f Republican campaigns after either of Clinton's victories. The press still hadn't let go of Al Gore's loss and now they're dissecting John Kerry's flop.

From every corner of the media empire, the explanations come fast and furious:

The Democrats were clueless on moral values. John Kerry was a lousy candidate. A northerner can't win anymore. The Bush team was better at manipulating the press. No one trusts the Democrats on national security. The gay marriage issue badly hurt the party. The Democrats need to move right, or left, or south, or undergo a personality transplant, or change the Constitution so Bill Clinton can run again.

But if 70,000 votes had shifted in Ohio, wouldn't journalists be floating similar theories about President Bush and the Republicans?

Part of it is that most journalists are Democrats and want to give the advice that will win the next election. But there's also a bit of laziness involved.

"We love doing the death of the parties and the death of great movements," says Roger Simon of U.S. News & World Report. "It's just a good, sexy story to say, 'Are the Democrats through?' If we didn't write about process, my God, we'd have to start writing about policy."

But of course, much of it has to do with policy. Democrat policies depart from the American mainstream.

But Jonah Goldberg also sees post election commentary as crimes of opportunity: "There are three or four days after every election where the clay is still malleable and everyone wants to pound it before it hardens into conventional wisdom. There's this furious battle for everyone to impose their own meaning on the election returns." The less glamorous reality, he says, is that "Bush got more people to the polls and no one thought he could."