Hi Jason,

This election wasn't really about Progressive vs. Conservative.  This election was about Unity vs. Dissent, about Ideology vs. Pragmatism.  This election was, fundamentally, a rejection of one-party government.  Unity and Ideology lost.  Dissent and Pragmatism, the basic design elements of American government as envisioned by the Founding Fathers, won.

One-party government works no better in the United States than it did in the former Soviet Union.  One-party government puts too great a burden on the goodness and honesty of individuals in power.  In the words of Lord Acton: "Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely."  This is particularly true when the ruling party is tightly unified and practices "message discipline," because that "message discipline" can all too easily translate to a State of Mutual Delusion where "inconvenient" facts are simply ignored.

This is a lesson we Democrats will forget at our peril in 2008.

Cris Brown

I think looking at the reaction of the Republican base to this election the Republicans will coming back in 2008 with a presidential nomination who is hard right on Immigration. The base will be very hawkish on Iran, probably the same way on North Korea, and the Christian right is going to be pulling very hard for someone, basically it will come down to ideology over electoral pragmatism.

John McCain is the electoral pragmatist that is obvious at this point, I don't know who the ideologue will be, maybe it will be Romney, maybe it will be one of their Southern Governors. But I think they aren't entirely wrong, America didn't tilt really hard left or we'd have won in Arizona and Tennessee and Ned Lamont would have crushed Lieberman.

What happened was people got tired of people in office and looked to pragmatic Dem challengers who had moderate, sensible progressive positions for a solution.

I'd be very wary of trying to go back to the Democratic party of the 1970s. We have a historic opportunity to break the perception that democrats are weak on security and hate the military and just want to whittle the Pentagon budget away by many tens if not hundreds of billions of dollars.

We nominate Hillary, or if we overreach with our new congressional powers we will get punished. Americans want a dignified way to get out of Iraq. We want out, we want out soon, but what was clear to me was that America does not want Anbar turning into Bin Laden's new base camp and we don't want to leave Muqtada Al Sadr largely in control of the Iraqi government.

America is ready for a genuine progressive with national security cred, but America does not want old style traditional liberals. America tilted hard for the Dem's because the center overwhelmingly moved into the Dem Column and we picked off moderate conservatives while motivating our base using anger over Iraq and the Bush presidency.

James,

I'd be very wary of trying to go back to the Democratic party of the 1970s. We have a historic opportunity to break the perception that democrats are weak on security and hate the military and just want to whittle the Pentagon budget away by many tens if not hundreds of billions of dollars.

Actually it was Democrats who drove the Pentagon Spending Spree of the 1960s, after Eisenhower quite sensibly kept cutting the Pentagon budget, and spending big chunks of it on barely-military projects like the interstate highway system.

There is a difference between "strong on defense" and "go on spending more on U.S. national defense than the rest of the world combined."  The former is what the Democrats must be.  The latter is what both Democrats and Republicans have done.

If a "national security credential" means a continued willingness to pour our nation's schools, hospitals, infrastructure, and future into the pockets of military contractors ...

... then color me "soft on defense."

Cris Brown