The last Note before Xmas

ABC News' The Note was disparaging of John Kerry and the Democrats for nearly all of the previous election cycle and today they get their parting shot.

With the chaos, rivalry, indecision, and lack of clarity of the race for DNC chair serving as a perfect metaphor for a party with little power and almost no sense of what it believes in or how to achieve it, the Democrats surely have a lot of reflecting and thinking to do over the next few weeks.

Several points we'd like to make:

1. Kerry won the votes of 57 million Americans - the most support for a presidential challenger ever. Also, the Democrats reversed a two-decades long decline and gained control of a number of state legislatures.

2. This year is the first real "race" for DNC chair since 1988. While the Note may disdain the Democratic process for it's lack of "clarity" or it's "rivalry" and "indecision," the fact that the Democrats are going through an extended and rather Democratic process in an effort to find the best person possible to lead the party for the next four years is not necessarily, as the Note makes it sound, a bad thing.

3. For Democrats it is not the "what" but the "how" that is the problem. To say we don't know "what we believe in" is a little low. In order to help The Note, who seem shockingly uninformed for a major political journal here are a few things most Democrats agree on:

-We're against privatizing social security.
-We're for a clean environment.
-We're for progressive taxation, not a tax policy that favors the wealthy.
-We're for a government that is held to account, and we're against another four years for Rumsfeld.
-We're for a moral foreign policy, not one that inspires hatred and fear of the United States while at the same time putting this country and her citizens in greater danger.
-We're for fiscal responsibility, not a budget process laden with omnibus spending bills, pork barrel spending, and deceptive accounting.

I could go on, but you get the idea. Certainly a lot of thought and "reflection" needs to go into where we go from here. But just because the Democrats are openly exploring their various leadership options does not mean we don't know what we believe in.