As the smoke rises from the wreckage of the John Kerry campaign, many Democrats are scratching their heads wondering why he lost. After all, Bush seemed all but defeated early in the year.

History was running against Bush. No president that lost the popular vote (like Bush did in 2000) ever got re-elected. But Bush did. Incumbents with less than a 50 percent approval rating stand on dangerous ground going into the election. Bush rarely had an approval rating above 50 percent in the last six months, but he comfortably captured the presidency with three million more votes than Kerry. To top it all off, the country agreed that Kerry won all three presidential debates.

This was Kerry’s campaign to lose, and he did just that. What went wrong?

First, Kerry wasn’t negative enough. Although it seems virtuous to not attack your opponent, this strategy only works in a primary where there are multiple candidates and the ideologues can rise above the mud slinging. This tactic worked for Kerry and Edwards in the Iowa caucuses.

But it doesn’t work in a presidential race when there are only two candidates. Kerry swung weak jabs at Bush at the three presidential debates and the Democratic National Convention. But the GOP managed to turn Kerry from a Vietnam War hero into a spineless, liberal sissy. The strongest blows came during the Republican National Convention, when Zell Miller, Dick Cheney and Arnold Schwarzenegger carpet-bombed Kerry’s reputation.

Second, Kerry made the focus of his campaign his Vietnam service. It seemed like a good idea, since being a war hero looks wonderful on a presidential resume, but this strategy was washed away once the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth surfaced in August. Kerry suddenly found himself without a campaign centerpiece, so he tried to remake himself in the last two months and focus on his Senate record. But it was too late. He never found a connection with voters.

The third, and most important, reason he lost is that Kerry didn’t take moral values seriously enough. He offered weak answers on abortion and same-sex marriage and hoped his campaign would be carried by his foreign policy plan and health care proposals. But many Americans don’t care about prescription drugs when they think their values are being threatened.

Americans thought Kerry was out of touch, and they turned out to be right. How else could a president with the odds stacked against him win so easily? And Bush showed many times that, no matter how hard he tried, he would never be average. A guy who said “Who among us is not a fan of NASCAR?” will never be able to look down-to-earth.