Losing the Virginia and New Jersey governorships hurt. Local factors played a part, but these are major states. So it matters why the Democrats lost them. Here are eight reasons, with lessons on how to reclaim the momentum of just a year ago:

Bad candidates.
The consensus choice,...

Like many of us, I've been cursing Max Baucus through most of the summer, for blocking our best chance for real health care reform in forty years. Now Baucus at least says he won't filibuster, but Joe Lieberman threatens to bring the bill down, and with it perhaps Obama's presidency....

As the health care fight approaches its end game, how do we, as ordinary citizens exercise power? How do we create enough of a potential cost to deter Max Baucus, Kent Conrad, Ben Nelson, Blanche Lincoln, or any of the other Democratic obstructionists from using the threat of supporting a...

My friend Robert Gordon is dying of lupus. He's a novelist who spent a decade teaching in the Washington State prisons and written essays for everywhere from Esquire, to The Christian Science Monitor, to the Boston Globe. Two months ago he wrote a wise and powerful open letter to...

If you're familiar with The Progressive, it's a wonderful magazine with a hundred-year history of advocating for progressive social change, going back to their founder, Robert La Follette. Doesn't matter what the issue, they were ahead of their time, and they continue to publish wonderful writers from Howard Zinn...

If you read the liberal blogosphere, you know about Senator Jefferson Beauregard "Jeff" Sessions's history of dubious racial statements. If you're following on most of the mainstream media, you don't. You might even buy the Alabama Republican's not-so-subtle assertion that Sotomayor is a "racist" -- discriminating against whites --...

My friend Robert Ellis Gordon is dying of lupus, with months left to live. He's spent more than a decade teaching writing to prison inmates, written a terrific book called The Fun House Mirror from those experiences and crafted a rave-reviewed novel, When Bobby Kennedy was a Moving Man, on...

Will serious health reform meet the fate of the scorpion and the turtle? In that fable, the scorpion pleads with the turtle to carry him across a river. The turtle resists, fearing the scorpion's sting, but the scorpion reassures him that he'd do nothing so foolish, since both would drown...

Are U.S. taxpayers getting stiffed? Pfizer, Viagra's daddy, is using money from taxpayer-bailed-out banks to help buy major pharmaceutical competitor Wyeth in a $68 billion deal. That won't help taxpayers or consumers. Nor is it designed to. It will harm the companies' workers, 20,000 of whom will likely be...

Like most Americans, I'm guarding my dollars, but when my furnace died during Seattle's coldest winter in decades, I needed to replace it. And when I did, with a high-efficiency Trane model made in Trenton New Jersey, the costs and gains underscored key lessons about what we need to do...

Here's the dilemma: Detroit needs to sell cars to survive, and they need to sell them now. But every fuel-inefficient car they produce and put on the road creates an additional lien on our common future, by increasing our oil dependence and producing tons of greenhouse gases over its ten-to-twenty...

Remember when the McCain campaign accused Barack Obama of "already measuring the White House drapes." It was more false populism, suggesting that it was the bi-racial son of a single mother who embodied a sense of entitlement, instead of the admiral's son who couldn't remember how many houses he had....

I just came back from eight hours canvassing swing exurban neighborhoods 20 miles south of Seattle. Walking two precincts, I left materials on about a hundred doors, spoke to a dozen or so people who'd already voted, and told a handful how to turn in their absentee ballots. It was...

I'd thought little about Ralph Nader's potential electoral impact until I read recent polls suggesting he was drawing 3% among likely Ohio voters, 4% in Nevada (plus 1% for Cynthia McKinney), 3% in Pennsylvania, and 5% in Missouri. This means he might once again help tip an election.

Most...

It's tempting to begin taking the likelihood of Obama's victory just a bit for granted. The polls look good. McCain and Palin are flailing, and Ted Stevens is headed for jail. The Republicans have started their blame game.

But it's dangerous to assume that the election is over, or...

On election day four years ago, I was canvassing in home state of Washington, alternately knocking on doors for gubernatorial candidate Christine Gregoire and breaking to call Ohio and Florida. After three recounts, Gregoire won by 129 votes. I had no idea my state election was so close, but I...

When Sarah Palin joked about herself and her fellow hockey moms as pit bulls with lipstick, she may have revealed more than she intended. She made it sound a compliment--portraying herself and her peers as ordinary mothers who look good but are tough, tenacious, and defend their family at any...

What does it say about John McCain that he not only picked the least experienced Vice Presidential nominee in America's history, but picked someone he really didn't know? Departing so far from any normal concept of appropriate background, he should at least have had a sense of why this individual...

It makes sense for the Florida and Michigan delegations to be sanctioned by the DNC, as has now happened. If the Democratic Party is going to win elections, you can't have states capriciously violating agreed-on rules. But an equally critical reason to dock the states delegations is that for a...

Obama did the right thing by praising Clinton following the Oregon and Kentucky vote, and working to reweave the fabric of Democratic unity. And I'm delighted that Clinton said, "No matter what happens, I will work as hard as I can to elect a Democratic president this fall." But then...