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.

More widely, there is the urgent need of tackling the raw reality of the Democratic presence in the South being all but wiped out.

The GOP has iron-grip control of the South.

The Dems will begin its search for a saviour who will magic his or her way into the White House in 2008, against a new Republican opponent.

Unless there is a seismic change in America's political DNA in the next four years, whoever the Democrats choose will need to appeal to the South and will need to straddle across the divide to attract Republican-leaning social conservatives. The reality is for more than 40 years no Democrat has succeeded to the White House who hasn't been from the South.

The Texan Lyndon Johnson, Jimmy Carter from Georgia and Bill Clinton from Arkansas all carried southern states with them in runs for the White House.

But merely being from the South isn't enough.

Al Gore, a native of Tennessee, flopped in the South in 2000. He could never quite shake the liberal or radical tag the GOP smeared him with.

He flopped in the South.

And Bush gave him a smack in the teeth by easily taking Gore's home state of Tennessee.

Half a dozen names have cropped up as likely contenders for the Democratic nomination in 2008.

They will almost certainly include Howard Dean, who is the standard bearer for the left wing of the party.

But Dean is unlikely to succeed where he failed so badly. As of now, the search seems to be for a moderate and centrist with strong southern roots.

There is no shortage of those in the national eye.

There is the ambitious Evan Bayh of Indiana and the impressive Virginia Governor Mark Warner.

John Edwards may stand but there is a feeling the former senator from North Carolina was an uneven campaign performer.

The two most exciting possibilities are Senator Hillary Clinton and the newly-elected senator for Illinois Barack Obama.

Clinton's ambition is neon the New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd yesterday wrote only a stake through the heart would stop her from entering the race.

It's notable since being elected senator, Clinton has made a marked turn to the right, eyeing a longer goal.

Yet, she presents a risk. She is a female candidate for one. Her husband's influence in the South may hold little sway among voters there. Besides, Bill Clinton to Republicans is what George Bush is to Democrats an enduring figure of hate and derision.

The Democrats' great hope could be enigmatic Obama, who seems to have real leadership.

But Barack is young and inexperienced at national level.

More likely, he will serve his apprenticeship in the Senate and wait until 2012.