As much as McCain tried to run against single-party rule in the closing days of his sad campaign and as likely as Saxby Chambliss is to run on it in his bid to hold onto his Senate seat on Dec. 2nd, the fact is that the American people get that a. splitting power between the parties in fact leads to paralysis, not bi-partisan cooperation (thank you, Mr. 25%) and b. the antidote to single-party Republican rule is not in fact "bi-partisanship" but rather single-party Democratic rule.

Check out these numbers from CNN (h/t TPM):

In the CNN/Opinion Research Corp. survey released Tuesday, 59 percent of those questioned said Democratic control of both the executive and legislative branches will be good for the country, compared with 38 percent saying such one-party control will be bad.

Another important finding in the poll is the positive view the American people have of the Democratic Party. Many Republicans and some in the media like to chalk the drubbing Republicans took on Tuesday up to the battered Republican brand and sure, that's true, but what goes less often remarked is the large store of goodwill that exists toward the Democratic Party.

The poll also indicates that the public has a positive view of the Democratic Party, with 62 percent saying they have a favorable opinion and 31 percent an unfavorable opinion of the party. For the Republicans, a majority, 54 percent, said they have an unfavorable view of the GOP while 38 percent hold a positive view.

As I said repeatedly last Spring, the extended primary was one long PR machine for the Democratic Party and we're seeing it bear fruit today. The popularity of both President-elect Obama and the Democratic Party offers an historic opportunity for Democrats, one that we must do everything we can to embolden them to embrace.

Update [2008-11-11 18:26:15 by Todd Beeton]:These numbers should also serve to strike down the silly claim that, despite last week's result, we're still living in a center-right nation. Eugene Robinson does his part to take this argument down.

What we're hearing instead from Republican politicians, pollsters and pundits is reassurance that the United States is a "center-right nation" with an innate distrust of progressive policies. The problem, these soothing voices say, is that under George W. Bush the GOP strayed from its basic philosophy of limited government and adopted the big-spending habits of the Democrats. Republicans need to rediscover their bedrock principles, this theory goes, and after a few years of rule by Barack Obama and his Democratic enablers on Capitol Hill, voters will come running home to papa.

So much is wrong with this analysis that it's hard to know where to begin. Let's start with the basic premise, that of a center-right American polity. To the extent that such a vague label has any real meaning, that may once have been the case. But if ours were a center-right electorate now, one imagines it might have been kinder to a center-right politician such as John McCain.