I absolutely agree with you to a point. Hubris is dangerous. But that is why it is all the more important to have a WEAK Dem. candidate. Seriously. Give me Kerry/Sharpton/Kucinich on the Dem ticket, and I'll put up any two Repubs with a Falwell, Robertson, and Jenna Bush cabinet. We'd win with 65% of the vote.
Give me a strong, conservative candidate, and who cares what the Dems do.
Actually, the REAL democratic party problem: they have a pool of potential candidates who haven't realized that the Summer of Love is over, and in the end, accomplished nothing.
The problem is psychological. The 1960's, to them, is the watershed event of their lives. They believe they "spoke truth to power" and "fought the establishment" without realizing they did nothing of the sort, on the one hand, and that they have become the establishment (that whioch they hated!), on the other. They haven't grown up mentally or ideologically. They cannot let their (mostly wasted) youth go. The current crop of Dem front-runners are, to our lasting shame, the "best" of the most narcissistic, ignorant, selfish generation ever coddled on American shores. That is until THEIR children grow up to assume responsibility, of course.
And with that 1960's mindset comes 1960's ideas, most of them demonstrably wrong, but like cats, you can't teach 'em anything.