Don't mourn, organize
After an obviously depressing day, I must admit that I'm glad to be halfway around the world at the moment! I'm still working through my own predictable little emotional cycle, complete with the feeling that progressives should all just throw in the towel and move to Canada (or even Taiwan - health care here is great and super-cheap). But really, the fact that those guys will be in charge of our security policy, health care policy, civil liberties and judicial nominations for at least four more years (with extremely little resistance in Congress for at least the next two) just means giving in is the last thing we should do.

As promised, here's my post-mortem:

What went wrong? I've heard a couple of opinions on this one, the leading one being that youth didn't vote. Apparently turnout was up - way up - on everyone except the 18-35 vote. Odd considering this election may well determine whether or not those very voters will face a draft in the near future. I find that really sad. The other plausible theory I've heard is that the progressive infrastructure just isn't well developed enough to defeat the right wing noise machine just yet. As a favorite blogger of mine noted, the Republicans have 40 years of parts and labor invested in their movement while ours began in earnest last year.
Neither explanation is very comforting, of course, but they do make sense. And they also point out what we need to do next time: don't give up, don't shut up, keep on organizing!
Eternal optimist that I am, I continue to believe that sooner or later, the media will stop refusing to state the obvious about the Republican party being owned and run by a bunch of bigoted thugs. No, I do not have such a low opinion of all Republicans. But George Bush, Dick Cheney, Tom DeLay, Rick Santorum, Tom Coburn (see below), et al have gotten where they are through a combination of dirty tricks and pandering to people's bigotries. That's objective fact, and it's gone unchallenged for a long time because the Left in America has lost its voice for so long. I think that's finally changed in the past year or two, and if we keep it up, it will make a difference.
I have friends who used to chide me for "hating all Republicans" because I said things like that last paragraph. More often than not, they used it as an excuse to avoid responding to examples I gave of how nasty those guys really were and are, usually demonstrating in the process that they (my friends, that is) simply didn't know much about just how ugly things were behind the curtain. No one throws that accusation at me anymore, with the occasional exception of a more moderate conservative who is up to his or her eyeballs in denial about who's at the wheel of the GOP.

Biggest Disappointment: Besides the obvious one, I'd have to go with the election of Tom Coburn to the Senate from Oklahoma. Coburn is the epitome of everything I despise about the modern Republican party. He's puritanical and hypocritical at once (he supports the death penalty for doctors who perform abortions - of whom he was one before he entered politics). He's vulgar. Among his many soundbites of this past campaign was one that involved calling political opponents "crapheads". He's a bigot, with a string of anti-gay and racist remarks a mile long to his name (most recently, it was something about lesbianism being so epidemic that some schools wouldn't let more than one girl go to the bathroom at a time). The Democrats had a great candidate against him, but Oklahoma is Oklahoma. As always, though, there is some hope that having him across the aisle will help Democrats in more moderate locales.

Bright Spot: Not that I have many to choose from, but seeing my home state of New Hampshire elect its second Democratic governor in a decade was a nice surprise. Prior to 1996, there had only been one such animal in my lifetime and for several years prior to that.

Blessing in Disguise: Anything that puts us another seat away from a Senate majority also puts civil liberties, abortion rights, gay rights and much more at bigger risk, so I'm sorry to see the Dems lose any Senate seat. That said, I'm not too sorry to see Tom Daschle lose. In a decade as Senate Democratic leader, he brought wishy-washiness and capitulation to a new level. Those of you who saw "Fahrenheit 911" might recall the footage of him saying "We will support the president [on Iraq]" on the Senate floor. That support earned no respect at all in the 2002 elections, of course, and it was just the tip of the iceberg for Daschle. I've always recognized that he had to be that way to an extent because he came from a very Republican state - but then, that's all the more reason why he should never have been made Democratic leader in the first place.
Now let's hope the Dems learn from their mistake and elect a real Democrat to replace him. I'm hearing a lot of buzz about Dick Durbin, who I think is an excellent choice. Barbara Boxer or Ron Wyden would sit pretty well with me too, or even Hillary Clinton - if nothing else, the satisfaction of seeing her drive Republicans to fits of apoplexy just by continuing to exist would be gratifying. But for Pete's sake, guys, it's time to start acting like a real opposition.

What to do now: Don't despair. Take a few days to stay as far away from politics as you need to - I certainly plan to do so - but don't give up. If you haven't already done so, read The Emerging Democratic Majority, which makes a good case for the future belonging to us if we're sharp enough to take it. (Anyone who tells you the last two elections proved the book wrong hasn't really read it, since the introduction makes the astute point that "The Democrats aren't there yet." Indeed, our biggest problem is that the growth of our new constituencies isn't keeping up with the atrophying of our old ones. But it won't stay that way forever.) I also recommend Mark Crispin Miller's Cruel And Unusual, which I just finished. It demonstrates pretty convincingly that Bush and Cheney really are as bad as those wild eyed liberals always say they are, and why. It also supplies examples by the truckload of right-wing hypocrisy and how conservatives tend to project their own worst qualities onto their opponents. Miller's style is hyperbolic and he occasionally even sounds paranoid, but frankly, that's not really uncalled for in this situation.

Rome wasn't built in a day. The recovery from 20+ years of silence on the part of progressives won't be either. But we'll get there.