Democrats also enjoy a formidable advantage in their ability to wage the "ground war" of electoral contests -- to turn out their base. Democrats draw this ground strength from three related sources: 1) The big-city constituencies that are principally liberal; 2) a passion for power that is expressed in their message and rooted in their blood; and 3) the special-interest vanguards that shape their message and possess the resources to turn out their troops. These vanguards are labor unions and leftist crusade groups -- racial agitators, abortion-rights feminists, gun-controllers and environmental zealots.

In order to win future elections, Republicans will have to develop strategies like "compassionate conservatism" to sell their message to the American center, and to make inroads into the Democratic base. As the Bush campaign has shown, the conservative core of the Republican Party is already moving in that direction. That is why Republicans were able to hold their coalition together and avoid the kind of fractional split that weakened the Democrats in the campaign.

While Republicans are learning to run to the center, however, centripetal forces among Democrats are pushing in the opposite direction. Already Gore has been hammered by critics for running an unfocused campaign that was often too far to the left of the spectrum. It has been argued that Gore should have attached himself more consistently to the Clinton prosperity and the Clinton political record, while putting distance between himself and the man. Analyses like this make the problem appear to be Gore as a person rather than forces that may lie beyond his control. But what if the real culprit is the Democratic Party and its core constituencies instead?

Gore, after all, is a calculating and experienced political operator. He undoubtedly has agendas that are more ideological than Clinton's, but he has kept them in check when necessary before. If, in this campaign, he has veered more to the left than he has in the past, it is more than likely that there were political reasons for making that choice. One was evident in the Nader result. This was a problem Gore tried to deal with throughout the election, and which he ultimately could not bring under control. If he had dropped his populist rhetoric and run hard to the center, as his critics suggest he should have, how much would Nader's percentage have grown? And against a centrist campaign like Bush's, how many independents could he have picked up to balance the deficit Nader would have created?

A second consideration for Gore was that the Democratic Party has increasingly become a party of the left. This fact has been obscured in the last eight years by the triangulating successes of the leader whose time is now passing. While President Clinton was busy misbehaving in his personal life, he was also busily at work making his party behave in its political course. Only a self-absorbed individual and superlative tactician like Clinton could have embraced core Republican policies (welfare reform and balanced budgets) and then imposed them on the party to force it into the American center.

But Clinton is history and Gore his own man. He lacks Clinton's political skills and probably his sociopathic tendencies as well. That has brought the Democratic Party's more radical character bubbling to the political surface. It was Gore's populist call to the Democratic Convention that brought his party home, put his campaign in sync and bumped his polls to winning heights. Prominent among the faces on the convention podium were those who represented the organizational keys to Gore's nomination and eventually to the turnout that carried him through. One of these was the leadership of the government unions who are philosophically socialist and politically dedicated to expanding the big government empire of the welfare state. An equally important presence was provided by the generals of the party's African-American divisions -- there is no other term adequate to describe a group that votes 90 percent Democratic (93 percent in Florida). These leaders -- left-wing to the core -- provided the most inflammatory propaganda offensives throughout the campaign and then, in its denouement, the shock troops of the attempt at a post-election coup.

Even by the standards of American campaigns, the effort by African-American leaders to scare the living daylights out of African-American voters (and credulous liberals) was extreme. In the African-American air war, Republicans were accused of covert racism and sympathy for hate crimes. Bush, their standard-bearer, was singled out as a man who took pleasure in executing unjustly sentenced African-Americans in the state of Texas. In one horrific TV ad worthy of Joseph Goebbels, NAACP propagandists re-created a lynching and presented the victim's daughter accusing Bush of killing her father "a second time."

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