Yes, Greenberg, Shrum, Carville. We have lots of values. Stop saying that.

Democratic Party pollster Stan Greenberg said Wednesday that “one of the biggest doubts about Democrats is that they don’t stand for anything.”

During a conference call with reporters, Greenberg said Democrats deal with “the same doubts they had about John Kerry” – the party’s 2004 presidential nominee. The issue arose as Greenberg discussed what Democrats need to do to stop Republican gains among Hispanic voters.

Greenberg’s comment come as Democratic leaders, including party Chairman Howard Dean, say they are trying to do a better job of telling voters who they are.

“Not that we need to change what we believe in, but need to do a better job of communicating what we believe in,” said Karen Finney, a Democratic Party spokeswoman.”

Carville and his fellow architects of the Democratic defeat have spent the last week defending their campaign strategy, culminating on Monday morning with a breakfast for an elite corps of Washington reporters. At the breakfast, Carville, together with chief campaign strategist Bob Shrum and pollster Stan Greenberg, seemed intent on one thing — salvaging their reputations.

They blamed the public for not responding to John Kerry’s message on the economy, and they blamed the news media for distracting voters from this critical message with headlines from that pesky war in Iraq.

But shouldn’t it have been obvious that Iraq and the war on terror were the real story of this campaign? Only these Washington insiders, stuck in an anachronistic 1990s mind-set and refighting the ’92 election, could think that the economy would be the driving factor in a post-9/11 world with Iraq in flames. That the campaign’s leadership failed to recognize that it was no longer “the economy, stupid” was the tragic flaw of the race.

In conversations with Kerry insiders over the past nine months, I’ve heard a recurring theme: that it was Shrum and the Clintonistas (including Greenberg, Carville and senior advisor Joe Lockhart) who dominated the campaign in the last two months and who were convinced that this election was going to be won on domestic issues like jobs and healthcare, and not on national security.

As Tom Vallely, the Vietnam War veteran whom Kerry tapped to lead the response to the Swift boat attacks, told me: “I kept telling Shrum that before you walk through the economy door, you’re going to have to walk through the terrorism/Iraq door. But, unfortunately, the Clinton team, though technically skillful, could not see reality — they could only see their version of reality. And that was always about pivoting to domestic issues.”

Vallely, together with Kerry’s brother, Cam, and David Thorne, the senator’s closest friend and former brother-in-law, created the “Truth and Trust Team.” This informal group within the campaign pushed at every turn to aggressively take on President Bush’s greatest claim: his leadership on the war on terror.