That, my friends, is the beauty of our system.

If we sometime in the future elect another Right-winger, we can grin and bear it, and prepare for the next election cycle. American politics is a pendulum, and it will swing Right again someday. (My hope is that, this time, we'll actually let the pendulum swing past the center, before we swing Right again!)

The lesson we need to learn from the dark years of GWB has far less to do with "right" or "left" in power, than with "don't give away the store" with regards to our rights and freedoms.

The problem wasn't that GWB was "from the Right;" the problem was that he dismantled checks and balances, did things covertly, refused oversight, acted autocratically, and placed partisan loyalty above all other qualifications for appointees and employees.

Were Obama to do the same, I'd ask for his head on a platter (though I'm 100% certain he never would).

No matter who we elect, or who they think their "base" is, we must be hyper-vigilant against such damage to our system. And we must *stop* the next villain who tries to destroy the very fabric of our democracy.

"I mean, look at the list of people Nagourey mentions as potential future national Republican figures: Tim Pawlenty, Sarah Palin, Haley Barbour ... are you kidding me?"

Good point, Thomas. If that's the most of what the Republicans can offer in 2012, the elephant is in deep s**t. I'm not a Republican, but I can tell you that none of those names stand out to me or make me want to turn red anytime soon. Palin's name alone just makes me what to go more blue with her idiotic propaganda. I think the younger republicans make better points like Paul Ryan (he says the Republicans need a fire hose to clean up the mess they made for themselves). He looks worth actually listening to, unlike Sarah Palin. Hey old people of the GOP, maybe you should actually listen to your youth. Obama did and look what happened.

George Orwell, prescient as ever, wrote an essay called Shooting An Elephant.

As I recall the first shot brought it to its knees, but it took a few more to finish it off.

Our rogue elephant has killed a lot of people and now, thanks to Obama, it has been stopped in its tracks, and can probably be finished off in a few goes, but it would be much better for the country if it could be kept alive, but weakened, like a virus used for making vaccines.

So by all means let it run with Palin for the next two elections, if she can win the primaries, as a reminder of the noble historical past of American religious fundamentalism as a political movement. In fact, I would encourage Democrats to vote for Palin in Republican primaries.

The GOP will survive as a regional party, running several state governments, but will never threaten the world again.

Meanwhile the rest of us can get on with running the Federal Government.

...the Democrat's hand wringing a few years ago and what is going on with the republicans.

The Democrats had and have a political philosophy embraced by the large majority of Americans and have an excellent track record of governing successfully in recent history (see Bill Clinton). The success of the republicans over the last 25 years has been to redefine what the Democrats stand for in their own false terms (see, how the right redefined "liberal" to mean "un-American"). The soul searching of the Democrats resulted in better strategy and more involvement from average Americans, not a philosophical shift or remaking of "who they are".

The republicans on the other hand have a crisis of fundamental philosophy and have a disastrous track record at governing (see George Bush, and even though the republicans have tried to rewrite the history, Ronald Reagan.) Changing their strategy will get the Republicans nowhere except out of power because their weird patchwork of political/religious philosophies has been exposed by their time in power.

What the republicans need to do is to redefine who they are and what they stand for. That will take a lot of time and will require that they admit to themselves that they have been disastrously wrong on almost everything since Reagan took office.

I see no indication that the republicans are prepared to accept the reality of their failures, therefore they will become more and more insignificant and most likely the religious fundamentalists which have fueled the republicans for the last 30 years will split, effectively ending the "conservative" movement in America.

That is why the "non-evangelicals" with the McCain camp have gone after Palin with such viciousness. They know she is the first manifestation of a split in the republican party where "evangelicals" (can we finally start calling them what they really are, "religious fundamentalists".) split from the republicans.

One of the funniest things of the last few weeks of the election season was watching Republican talking heads claim that the financial crisis put McCain at an unnatural disadvantage that he wouldn't have otherwise suffered. Like it was a natural disaster that couldn't be helped, instead of a growing popular rejection of Republican economic philosophies and policies. They broke the economic system. Why would anyone think they can fix it?

Republicans need to think long and hard about why so many people trusted Obama to handle the crisis more than McCain. It's not just because he came from the non-incumbent party. He offered practical solutions instead of ideological pronouncements disconnected from ordinary life.

... is that they are so deeply committed to their dogma that they can't even conceive of the possibility that it might be wrong. They will continue to believe that their policies are infallibly correct, and that they lost the election only because they didn't package their product properly. The difficulty is that voters now seem to realize that the product itself sucks, no matter how it's packaged.

in my opinion, is this: their party is split, for the first time since Nixon, in a fundamental way. They have evolved into two groups that can barely fit in the same big tent anymore: rural Christian social conservatives and the blue-blood urban investor class.

On almost all major issues, from immigration to global interventionism to Wall Street bailouts, these two factions are drifting apart. Old standbys like gay marriage and assault rifles aren't enough to glue them together anymore, You have Palinites marching under the creationist flag, Huckabees actually acknowledging the working poor, aging Vietnam chickenhawks talking swift-boats and white flags, and Arnie going as green as Al Gore.

The neo-cons, during their short moment, tried to keep the party together with token slogans and attrition politics, but ultimately their heart wasn't in it: they really just wanted to plunder the outsourcing of America and the fruits of deregulation until the next election.

Now, without a coherent ideological core, the Repubs are going back to the drawing board. Unfortunately, they can't "draw too good", and they will have to re-learn, and un-learn, a lot of their political playbook, from the Southern Strategy to "how to talk to black and brown people."

Of course, the Democrats are not necessarily in better shape fundamentally or demographically. The two big things they have going for them are the ineptitude of the Republicans and the overwhelming demographic trend toward younger, more multi-ethnic, and more urban voters. It's still not a realignment, but it's a movement, and as the ice floes drift and cracks form, voters and politicians have to change their footing.