I know a lot of people won't believe this, especially in light of my endorsement, but today wasn't as happy for me as you might expect. That's not just because I woke up with a splitting headache from a ridiculous hangover. (Note: Electoral college does not imply electoral fraternity does not imply electoral drinking game. And betting against Bush for Florida did me no favors.) A victory I didn't care much about has come at the expense of a lot of folks who did care very deeply, and that's been tough to watch.

The blogosphere has been awash with people cursing the outcome. (I'm sure that's just a fraction of the links most people could manage. I've been avoiding blogs all day, mostly due to work pressures, but also because I didn't want to read it yet.) I watched the results last night in a heavily Democratic room, and felt the mood ebb. And at the end, why in the hell did it have to come down to Ohio?

Sure, the results provide me with a bit of justification. The more or less common story is that conservative Christians turned out to vote for amendments against gay marriage, the direct result of the kritarchy of Massachusetts. I can't argue with the result: as I've said, I'm not that worried about gay marriage, but this will act as a deterrent to the next round of social change that someone wants to push through courts instead of legislatures. (I'm glad I wasn't blogging today: Waddling Thunder got to make the argument before me, and he's made it very well.)

But not Ohio. In my heart of hearts, I really wanted Ohio to be the exception. Because whatever else, I knew that people I cared for were going to Ohio. I knew that Chris had been working his guts out for his cause there. And I knew that if it came out against him, he'd be cruelly disappointed. OK, that's not a rational reason to back one outcome over the other--there are a million other activists in other states who will be just as devastated, and had the decision gone otherwise there would have been enraged Republicans--but sometimes the hopes one has for the future just aren't rational. I didn't want Ohio to pass its proposition, I hoped Pennsylvania would go red so Ohio could go blue, and I really didn't want it to be the last state.

Anyway, there's a Bush presidency, a fair amount of Republican triumphalism and a lot of Democratic angst. And pundits everywhere are looking for the "lessons of the election," which seems such a doomed effort that I'm sorely tempted to try it. If I had to give my Democratic colleagues some advice for 2008, it would come down to two ideas.

First, divorce the lawyers from the Democratic Party. The backlash against gay marriage really is the smaller part of the issue. The larger part is that so much of the intellectual (and financial) support for the Democrats come from a group of people that are very bad at convincing other Americans.

I know, that's fairly provocative (although hardly original). After all, we legal types are supposed to be trained to argue, right? And we are. But we're trained to argue in a very specific way, for a very specific audience--mostly for judges. We cocoon ourselves in a profession with exclusive rules and complex norms which cut us off from the "lay" masses. And in the end, this is simply not conducive to connecting with people outside that world: on one level, we're too used to arguing within a web of preconceived assumptions about "rights" and "process," and have a hard time stepping out of that and engaging.

The thought occurred to me today as I was practicing for a presentation of a more technical than legal nature. One thing I've noticed about law reviews and the legal world is an almost allergic aversion to diagrams or Powerpoint, but here I was putting together a maze of arrows to represent information flows. And as I was dry-running the speech, I felt my brain click: I was relaxed, effusive, in-the-zone with my audience, trying to tell them why a system would make their life easier. For the first time in ages, I was outside the assumptions, not "thinking like a lawyer."

Don't get me wrong: I love the law, and I'm looking forward to my professional career. But it is a mindset, and I wonder the extent of the effect it's had on the Democratic Party.

Second, the Democrat's big "quick win" would be to learn a language of religion. There are many voters who vote with their hearts and their souls rather than their pocketbooks, but in many quarters this is seen as something fantastic. Take, for instance, David Usborne, a writer for the UK-based Independent, quoted by Irishlaw:

Voters, especially those in the heartland states, took moral values as their core standard in deciding which candidate to support. Indeed, this may emerge as the most surprising finding to emerge from this presidential race.

Too much of the left now thinks of religion as some form of irrational fiction, that anyone hooked on the Left Behind series must be unworthy of, or incapable of, reasoning with. But each and every one of them has a vote, and in this election they were provoked and used it. Kerry's position--that he was against gay marriage, but would leave it to the states--was untenable so long as the bulk of his supporters were campaigning against DMA, where "leaving it to the states" meant "leaving it to state judges." This was not a convincing argument to someone who did care about the issue.

That doesn't mean, as one Democrat on the radio said today, that they'd be best off nominating a President who doesn't support gay marriage or abortion. There are good religious arguments for same-sex marriage that have been made, and with some force. They're not, however, silly lists from Leviticus or pointing out that Jesus never speaks against gay marriage directly. They' complex, well-reasoned, and speak within the language of faith. Most importantly, they're generally made by individuals of stong and persuasive faith themselves. It takes much more courage to embrace--not "nuance"--a contrarian position within a church than outside it.

It certainly takes more courage than the standard Kerry line of "Whatever my religious belief, it shouldn't be our nation's." That the argument makes sense to secularists does not make it a particularly useful line to woo the section of the electorate that is not secular.

Instead, "learn the language." Learn what someone of faith cares about and how to argue within that sphere. (It's not unlike learning to "think like a lawyer.") And then come out full-bore for homosexual marriage with arguments that treat religion as a source of authority and a driving factor in why such marriage must be recognized, not as an obstacle to be overcome before one gets to the secular reasoning. People resent being considered obstacles. And when naysayers complain this tactic won't work, just point out that it only has to work a very little on the margins: much as Republicans win if we can crack a fraction of the African-American vote, Democrats can make great gains quite quickly here.

I'm not sure how seriously he meant it, but the most poignant Democratic statement I read today came from Brian Leiter, who said, "I do not know the country in which I live." That statement shouldn't be an indictment of the nation, but an exhortation to learn about it.