Okay, so let's start with goal-setting for 2008.  You made Stuart Rothenburg eat crow, let's start identifying candidates and races, and setting goals, for the next cycle.  

Personally, I'm going to be arguing hard that Larry Grant would be a great candidate to put up against Larry Craig in Idaho.  Everyone probably thinks that Craig is safe, especially after Grant lost early this morning.  

I disagree.  I posted a diary on it.  But, what do you think?  And what other "safe" races should we concede, or challenge?  

I like your ideas, and have been lurking at this sight for about a year.  I particularly like the idea that we need to identify districts where, once we can win them, they are more likely to become reliably Dem.  

On a local note, Idaho demographics are changing, albeit slowly.  In Meridian, people stood in line for 3 and 1/2 hours to vote.  In Meridian.  Idaho.  There's potential here.  

Chris, I remember you writing about ways the GOP passed legislation to change the electorate to maintain their majorities. Looking at the exit poll data, it is once again clear that being in a union household substantially increases the chances of voting Democratic. Isn't it time we put pro-union legislation with the other first 100 hour ideas? It would force those supposed pro-labor moderate Republicans to take a stand.

Chris--

You're a machine!  

Doubtless you've slept less than 8 hours the last week, but here you are plugging away at this.  

Thank you for recognizing that we've got to fight right now for the recognition.  Thanks for doing your part to put together the case.  Thanks for staying up.  

Just thanks.

I agree.  I think liberals/progressives are such independent-thinkers and harbor such an innate mistrust of established organizations, that we tend to shy away from governance as too messy or involving too many compromises. Such is life.  

We need a more pragmatic view and accept the responsibilities that our citizenship entails.  I slumbered through the Clinton years, content that the country was headed in the right direction, that our country would move forward as a matter of course.  The past six years have shown me how wrong I was.  

We should use this momentum to build an infrastructure as strong as that built by the Repubs, as addressed in Kos' book "Crashing the Gates." The beauty of it is that we'll never move in such lock-step as the Repubs, but we definitely need a more cohesive structure, to channel our collective energy yet not be hostage to single-issue groups, nurture our own, multiply and enhance our strengths.  

NPR is spinning the results as a win for "moderates". Could that be because that is who they are most comfortable with themselves?

I'd also really really like someone to do a poll where they ask ideology and instead of "liberal" being an option, "progressive" is the option. I think it would jump up 10% or more.

Another way to say it is that the centrist Democratic regime, as per the DCCC, has to be watched so that they don't try dragging Democrats towards "being more Republican". We have to get rid of the DCCC or at least teach them that Democrates need to "be more like Democrats".

This part here is really the key:

Taking a quick and admittedly crude look at the aftermath of our previous three landslide elections, I see a pattern where, once Democrats win, they naively assumed that the natural order of American politics has been restored and failed to act in ways that allowed them to maintain or expand upon their majorities. After 1964, Democrats governed quite poorly when it came to Vietnam, thereby dividing both the nation and their own coalition, and thus leading to defeat in 1968. After 1974, when Democrats took Depression-era leads in Congress, Jimmy Carter ran an extremely milquetoast, fluffy and image-based campaign once he sowed up the nomination. As we rested on our laurels, the conservative movement continued to dig in, and by 1978-1980, whatever gains we made were more than wiped way. In 1992, we won the trifecta back after twelve years, and then proceeded to run against tour own party once we had it. And so the 1994 landslide happened.

I was writing about the best case.  Worst case is that a wave one way is followed by a stronger wave the other way--which is the subject here.  What we need to do is put the two pictures together, side-by-side and ask, what makes one happen versus the other.  I agree with the general description that Chris laid out, but it's useful to make that description more exact.  Why did Democrats let Vietnam slide?  Well, it so happens that there's only one book, so far as I know, that deals with the role of Congress in the Vietnam War. A Grand Delusion: America's Descent Into Vietnam by Robert Mann.  The House doesn't really figure in it.  For historical as well as insitutional reasons, it was all about the Senate.   Publishers Weekly:

Mann, a former Senate aide, puts Senate-president politics at the center of this masterful political history of America's involvement in Vietnam, which began with Truman's commitment to support the French in the wake of charges of "losing" China to the Communists. Many of the senators who attacked the Truman administration were isolationists who voted against the realistic anti-Communist institutions such as NATO and the Marshall Plan. Yet such contradictions mattered little, as the Democrats' disastrous political defeat in 1950 and 1952 convinced them to never let another "loss" be blamed on them. The twin strands of ideological surrealism and political realism interweave throughout Mann's account in various forms, illuminating the persistent patterns and underlying motivational logic of presidential lies and congressional acquiescence. Eisenhower promised to end Truman's containment policy, but he delivered the Korean armistice and refused to fight in Vietnam. Two major congressional resolutions authorizing use of force led to the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution. Johnson promised "no wider war" while escalating for fear of "losing" Vietnam. Mike Mansfield - the Senate's foremost Asia authority, as well as majority leader - opposed America's deepening involvement, but his concept of his institutional role made him publicly loyal to Johnson's policies, which in private he strove mightily to change. Each participant responded distinctively to fundamental contradictions, brilliantly elucidated by Mann's highly nuanced account of presidential policy and the tortured evolution of Senate opposition. This book's unique perspective in illuminating Congress's role in the Vietnam War should permanently alter and deepen our understanding of that conflict.

The other two elections were, IMHO, much more about the Dems persuing the chimera of political reconciliation and bipartisanship with people who are uncompromising partisans who routinely put party above all else.  Clinton, in particular, turned his back on an unbelievable record of GOP malfeasance (with a small, but crucially positioned amount of Democratic involvement) and said, in effect, "We're not going to get into that.  We want to move forward together."  Well, we saw what that got us.

I'm not offering this as a definitive description.  It's just a comment, after all.  I'm stating it as a invitation for us to flesh this out more fully, because the lessons here are obviously of utmost importance.

We in the blogosphere are the only politically potent repository of historical memory.  (Obviously, there are folks who know the history much better than we.  They're called history departments.  But they aren't political potent.) The rest of the political system is so drenched in spin it wouldn't know real history if it walked up and bit them in the ass.  So it's up to us to take that history, ponder the lessons, debate their significance amongst ourselves, and then start getting the conclusions out into the wider world.

The natural, over-determined tendency of the Versailles establishment is to think in terms of cliches, myths, the CW and short-term time horizons.  These all lead to exactly the wrong sort of strategy, and one more repetition of the pattern Chris is writing about.

We can do better.

We have to do better.

they naively assumed that the natural order of American politics has been restored and failed to act in ways that allowed them to maintain or expand upon their majorities.

I couldn't agree more that this is a big issue facing the Democrats after this big win.   As Paul Krugman pointed out, the Republicans are a revolutionary power.  They don't believe the "natural order" is valid.  Pelosi and Reid should continue to talk bipartisanship because it sooths the ears of the Gang of 500 but I hope they know that if the tables were turned, they'd be cast right back out in the wilderness like the past 12 years.   Remember all that talk about how the presidency was "theirs" during the Clinton years and he didn't "deserve" it?

Talk bipartisanship but keep them firmly on a leash.

Jimmy Carter ran an extremely milquetoast, fluffy and image-based campaign once he sowed up the nomination.

er, were you alive in 1976? Jimmy Carter talked about recognizing the legitimate rights of the Palestinians. That was very very radical, indeed it remains radical. Also Carter's idea about making human rights an official part of our foreign policy.

Well, I am not going to refight that, suffice to say your understanding of our current situation is better than your understanding of the Carter era.

Somewhere in his archives Wolcott wrote the definitive post on Jimmy Carter and the Washington power elite.