Democrats in damage control, hunting for a leader to spread their wings

WELL, by now we’ve found out the self-styled eagle could squawk better than he could fly.

As John Kerry's campaign came crashing to earth late on Tuesday night, the Democratic Party knew they had a wreckage on their hands.

For the party, the focus for now is doing the forensics on how George Bush maintained and widened the gap in the battleground states and consolidated his hold in former Democratic strongholds. The legacy for Kerry is he will join a growing group of liberals (Walter Mondale) or liberal North-Easterners (Michael Dukakis) who, to be blunt about it, were not JFK.