Back in July, at the convention, I sat down with Simon for a few minutes at an NDN event. And this was just after the Matt Bai article in the Times magazine had come out about the movement afoot to rebuild the Democratic party's infrastructure and so forth.

Spirits were high all around at that point in the campaign. And Simon's work had figured prominently in the piece so he was very jazzed with that along with everything else that was happening at that moment (check out the piece, if it's not clear what I'm talking about). And at one point he said that what this network of people were trying to do would take a good ten years to accomplish -- building new institutions, sustainable sources of funding, new party infrastructure, and so forth.

I entirely agreed, I said. But my great worry, I told him, was that if Kerry lost the whole thing could be snuffed out in the cradle. Even today the sort of things we're talking about have only been in motion for a year or two. And the truth is that that's just not nearly enough time. So my worry was that you had all these people joining these new groups and giving money and getting involved in online activism and throwing themselves into the political fray. And if Kerry lost there might be some collective sense of, Wow, we did everything imaginable, had a united party, a motivated base, gave money, went door to door, blah blah blah. And it didn't work. So it's hopeless. Or all this rebuilding infrastructure business just didn't pan out after all. Or, in some sense, what we thought was the beginning of something new was just a dead-end.

And, so, here we are. In case you haven't heard, Kerry lost. And so what was my worry -- and I'm sure one many others felt too -- becomes a concrete challenge. A year or two was never going to be enough time. It's a much longer process, one with rhythms deeper and more sustained than the every-other-year election cycle. I remain excited and optimistic about the Democratic party's future. I think that a decade and two decades from now we'll look back and see what happened here in the first few years of this century as a beginning point, the beginning of a process that bore fruit in powerful and consequential ways in subsequent years. ...

I've said all along that it took 30 - 40 years to build the right-wing regime we now live under (depending on whether you date it from Goldwater's loss in 1964, when the defeated right started the process of re-grouping and building a new intellectual political structure to compete with the traditionally liberal academy, or somewhat later on, when they began to infiltrate the political process at the local level and built the foundations for the Reagan revolution), and it's likely to take a similiar amount of time for us to rebuild to the point where we can begin to reconstitute the liberal state they've been hell-bent on dismantling (and doing a good job of it, too).

Perhaps it won't take us 30 or 40 years, but it'll certainly be a period of time measured in the decades, even if we manage to win the next general election or regain some measure of power in Congress. That's assuming, of course, that we build on the foundations of the Democratic party that are already in place. If, however, we run off half-cocked like spoiled children because we lost a few very important elections, and try to start the whole process basically from scratch -- which is what bolting to the Greens essentially is -- then 30 - 40 years seems like a real minimum and a half-century more likely.

I can't speak for anyone else, but I'm 50 years old now, and I'd like to think that the Great Liberal Revival can happen in my lifetime, if we make the right decisions, don't panic, and stay the true course. I've my doubts that I'll live to reach 100, so I'd love for the whole thing to happen in an expedited manner. (Not to mention the fact that the sooner we regain power, the sooner we can start undoing the right's bad works.)

(Incidentally, I'd be happy with either Rosenberg or Dean in the Democratic driver's seat.)