Now that the presidential election that wouldn't end has finally ended, if Democrats are serious about recapturing the White House in four years, they need to carefully examine how they blew it. Everyone wants to know how a sitting vice president, running on a record of broad government experience and economic prosperity, could lose to an inarticulate bumbler named George W. Bush.

After the polls closed, Democrats immediately began blaming Ralph Nader for Gore's problems. While it is technically true that Nader's withdrawal from the race would have quickly propelled Gore into the White House, the problem runs deeper than Nader1s candidacy or the disenfranchisement of African American voters in Florida. Gore couldn't carry Tennessee, his home state.
He couldn't carry Arkansas, the president's home state. In Missouri, a dead man won on the Democratic ticket for the Senate, and Gore couldn1t even carry the Show Me state. In effect, "Dead Man Walking" outran Gore.

The problem was neither Nader nor an election whose outcome wasn't determined until five weeks after Election Day. The problem was the Democratic Party.

If Democrats learn nothing else from the protracted debacle, they should understand that the country does not want two Republican parties. In recent years, Democrats have tried to out-Republican the Republicans. And that paved the way for Gore's surprising loss to George "Dubya."

Democrats have had plenty of experience losing national elections. When he was governor of Arkansas, Bill Clinton decided to do something about it. After seeing Democrats lose the White House in five of the previous six outings, Clinton carefully crafted a strategy to win back 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

Clinton, perhaps the most masterful politician of our time, managed to put forth a basically conservative platform while simultaneously reassuring African Americans, women and labor that he was their best friend. This coalition of conservative party activists and progressives such as Jesse Jackson provided the support base for his two-term presidency.

Al Gore, trying to build on the Clinton road map to the White House, said all the right things to African Americans - pledging support for affirmative action and opposing Driving While Black stops - while tipping his hat to the Right by favoring capital punishment and backing the movement to keep Elian Gonzalez in the United States instead of having him reunited with his father in Cuba.

Gore's problem was that it took him too long to return to his base. It was just before the National Democratic Convention that a struggling Al Gore gave up his obsession with wining over the "independent voter" and moved to reclaim the traditional Democratic base - Blacks, women and labor. It was only then that he experienced a rise in the polls. However, by then, it was too late.

In the end, it was African Americans who proved yet again to be the most loyal bloc of Democratic voters, providing the margin of victory in several battleground states, including in Michigan and Pennsylvania. For example, Gore carried Michigan by only three percentage points. Bush out-polled Gore among Whites in that state by eight percentage points. But the Black turnout of more than 90 percent tilted the election in Gore's favor. In Florida, African-Americans turned out in record numbers, reaching 952,000, up from 527,000 in 1996.

We have already seen how a highly-politicized Supreme Court effectively ended Al Gore's candidacy for president while disenfranchising some Black voters in Florida. With George W. Bush expected to appoint at least two new members to the court, it will only get worse.