What's struck me in the last few days is how the media has suddenly stopped referring to Obama and the Democrats with unveiled disgust. Winning is -- respectable.
Here's my take. The Democrats were like a team that had finally gotten the strong players, but had yet to get a big victory. There's a line that separates the thing that's extremely difficult to achieve from the thing that's impossible to achieve, and until you win a big victory you are filled with doubt about the wisdom of going for the big victory. Now the Democrats have a big BIG victory. The Democratic lawmakers now know what a big win feels like, the political pros, too, along with the big donors, the small donors and the grass roots.
New Big Things are going to be hard to win, too, but the question about whether something is just hard and not impossible will no longer nag.
The Democrats were far more disappointing when they won full control in '08 than they had been when out of power. Well, now we know why, or at least I think we do. There was no way of knowing if the big things were possible before, so the congressional Democrats remained bumfuzzled. Now the true situation is finally going to come into focus --- they really do have power, and the big fights are winnable. They'll always be the Democrats, and "herding cats" will still describe Pelosi's job and Reid's and Emmanuel's, but when you win as big as we won today you know it's worth trying again.
In November you can tell me if I was wrong, but I think that if the Democrats can now grind this sausage through the Senate for final passage everything the GOP has been joyously assuring itself about how well they'll do in the mid-terms will have been wrong. They'll keep insisting that they're going to do very well, but they have been kicked in the gut really, really hard today, and all the happy talk in the world won't substitute for the Obama voters from coming out on Election Day. Of course nobody knows nuthin' in March, but however bleak things looked for us a few weeks ago, they sure don't look bleak at the moment.
So, though I would've loved single payer, or at least a public option passing, I think the fact that today's events and the fight leading up to them have given our guys a taste of what it's like to really win. We may look back on this day as the day when things really turned around.