Iraq veteran Paul Hackett has lost the Ohio Dist. 2 congressional election, but he has won credibility for himself and for the Democratic Party by nearly costing the Republicans one of their safest districts in the state. The trouble is, while this story has been top news in the liberal blogosphere for weeks, if you had only been watching the mainstream media on Tuesday, then unless you’re living in Ohio you would have had no idea that any of this was happening.

Yet despite the lack of coverage it was a major piece of news. The Democrats ran a competitive race in a district redder than Rudolph’s nose. Republicans have won in Ohio-02 by more than forty points in each of the past four congressional elections. But Paul Hackett lost by only four points—a tenth of previous Democratic losses! Yes, he still lost. The Republicans kept their seat. But the bottom line is that, by the conventional wisdom, he should never have had any chance whatsoever.

It was the confluence of serendipity, opportunity, and genuine alacrity. The Ohio State Republican Party for months had been mired in a corruption scandal and the Republican candidate, Jean Schmidt, was herself dogged by corruption, lackluster campaign action, and terribly bad judgment—she even went to far as to accept a donation from Tom DeLay’s political action committee. The Dems, meanwhile, found themselves with a clean-cut Iraq veteran fresh back from the war with a belly full of a fire and an itch to fight the good fight, run a race, and take Congress one step back into the blue. He was a man with credentials and charisma, and the netroots poured volunteers into his campaign, forcing the Republicans to divert half a million dollars they hadn’t planned on spending.

That’s worth saying again. A district as red as they come got sliced clean down the middle today. Dead is the idea that Democrats are only competitive where the DCCC wants us to be competitive. We can run a race anywhere in the country, and although maybe there aren’t enough dollars and volunteers to run a race everywhere at once, we no longer have to buy the lie that red is red. If we run everywhere, we can bleed the Republican money machine dry. All it takes is the same sort of passionate devotion that the religious right has cultivated to such great success in the past decade.

We can’t control serendipity. Not every Republican candidate is going to be this inept. But we can control opportunity by fielding strong-willed candidates, and freeing them to say what’s on their minds rather than regurgitating the usual safe and tasteless party drivel. And while we can’t control the alacrity, we can definitely encourage it. If simply looking in the newspaper at Bush’s latest treason isn’t enough to get those liberals hitting the pavement, then we can stoke the coals here at home by pressing the stories and the issues that the big networks don’t bother to run.

I don’t understand why the bid media didn’t cover this election in depth. Either the conspiracy theorists are right and they’ve even less integrity than I thought, or they simply didn’t think a paradigm-shifting election was as important than the latest gripping Natalee Holloway update, in which case they’re even stupider than I imagined. Nevertheless, coverage or not, something important has happened in Ohio. The dynamics of Democratic campaign strategy are shaken up. The entire strategy of competing only in the purple places instead of waging full-out war in the GOP’s country clubs and gated suburbs is suddenly in doubt. Given our track record so far this decade, I think that’s a damn well overdue piece of good news. This is the sort of thing that will bring health and life back to the Democratic Party.