Sometimes it is motivating to read articles from the other side. John Andrews' "What the Hell Happened in Colorado?" contained this:

The message gap was a consequence of this motivation gap. Democrats talked about making Colorado a better state, about not letting Republicans cut cherished programs, and about the GOP's supposed obsession with "gays, guns, and God." Republicans talked about . . . what? Other than denying their charges and hurling some back, we pretty much punted. Republican candidates picked their own issues locally. Churchill would have called it a pudding with no theme.

Andrews is wondering why the Democrats won big in Colorado (except, of course, for that whole voting-for-Bush thing). The Republican Senate seat became Democratic again. The Democrats took control of both houses of the state legislature for the first time since 1960.

His reason is that the Republicans had no message. Sound familiar? Switch the parties (and positions) around, and it sounds the same thing the Democrats have been saying nationally.

So is it possible that you simply pull out the excuse about message whenever your side loses? I'd like to think that the Democrats won in Colorado because the people there support its positions. It seems much less painful to say "they would agree with us if we had gotten our message out better," but both sides can't be right. If both sides got their messages out so that the public was completely informed, who would be winning elections?

Sure, it is possible that the Democrats in Colorado have done something right that the Democrats in other states did wrong, and that we should learn from what they did. But if John Andrews is right, the flip side could also be possible--that the Republicans in Colorado have done something wrong, and need to learn from the Republicans in other states.