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" My fellow Editors (click here, or just see below) are profoundly pessimistic about the current and future state of the union. Not for the first time, I find myself in disagreement.  To begin at the beginning: I sat down to write this morning with the unoriginal idea of doing a year-end wrap of the political accomplishments of 2010. It was never going to be revelatory \u2014 but it was instructive. Because despite record-breaking obstruction in Congress (91 GOP filibuster attempts this year alone), much got done. There is, of course, the bill Everyone Has Been Talking About: the passage of health-care reform. But there are many, many others that haven&amp;#039;t gotten nearly the attention they would have in better economic times and less divisive electoral ones. Pay-As-You-Go was reenacted after an eight-year hiatus under the Bush-Republican Congress regime. Major banking reforms limiting the behaviors that led to the current recession were signed into law. The government stopped paying private banks to give out student loans and will instead issue those loans directly, at significant savings to taxpayers and to students. The shockingly unjust disparity between sentencing for cocaine and crack crimes was significantly reduced \u2014 though not eliminated. It is now impossible for foreign courts to enforce libel claims against Americans that violate our own, magnificently broad First Amendment understanding of libel law. Schools are now required to feed children healthier meals. Shortly, gay Americans will no longer be able to be fired from the military simply for being gay, and their beloveds will be able to give them support and comfort openly, just as straight beloveds have always been allowed to do. Upon Russia&amp;#039;s impending ratification of the New START treaty, our inspectors will once again be given access to Russian nuclear stockpiles to assess their security, deployment, and maintenance. And for good and ill, everyone&amp;#039;s taxes remain at the Bush levels.   And all this, again, despite unprecedented obstructionism by the minority party. Or, I should say, the former minority party. The big story of the year, of course, is the Republican gains in the Congressional elections. And for the record, I&amp;#039;m in general agreement though not emotional unity with the Editors that the nation has elected a large number of raging ideological fools. But the functioning of Congress has a way diluting even the purest tea with the milk of self-interest, and in any case the GOP is about to discover the second side of the double-edged sword of victory.  For the past two years, it has had the ability to complain about being sidelined because it was, in fact, on the sidelines. Right or wrong (mostly the latter), it could pin any controversial Congressional action or inaction on those stubborn Dems.  Not any more. Republicans control the House and have a much larger minority vote in the Senate. They therefore own a far greater share of the responsibility of governing. Undoubtedly they are hoping to use that as a cudgel aimed squarely at the president&amp;#039;s head: hoping to push through legislation that he will not sign and block legislation that he would, and then to blame him for opposing the will of the people. I doubt it will work. Here I have to get into the finger-in-the-wind side of prognostication \u2014 always a shaky thing \u2014 but it&amp;#039;s my strong sense that the country is past the left-right, Democratic-Republican ideological battles of the past two years and is most interested in having its government address problems swiftly, directly, and pragmatically. Even before November, I sided with Dave Weigel&amp;#039;s assessment of the meaning of the elections: that they were not a demonstration of love for the GOP, but of dissatisfaction with politics as a whole. Out with the bastards in power, in with new blood: a vote for pure change, no matter who represented it.  The general shrug that followed the lame-duck session&amp;#039;s actions confirmed this for me. Nobody outside of the GOP power structure seems to much mind that homosexuals can now wear the uniform without fear, or that we just signed a treaty with the erstwhile KGB. Mitch McConnell also seems to have indicated that he shares this view. Tossed a juicy piece of bait by Chuck Schumer \u2014 Luca to Harry Reid&amp;#039;s Michael \u2014 who stated that he expected the next six months in Congress to be full of legislative action, McConnell said ... nothing. His choice was to agree and hand the Democrats a PR coup, or tell the American people that he would stick to his old strategy of filibustering every bill that came to a cloture vote. Neither, evidently, was attractive. There are also the polls showing that Sarah Palin is unpopular everywhere, even within her own party. I&amp;#039;ve never thought much of her, never felt she&amp;#039;s a viable political figure, but she does represent a very specific view of the conservative project: that it is simply to oppose at all points and without compromise anything that comes with a Democratic tag attached. To roughly a fifth of the nation, that&amp;#039;s attractive. To roughly half of it, that&amp;#039;s a deal-breaker. The rest want to see who else is on offer before deciding \u2014 and among those who will be are Republicans with far greater accomplishments and far more moderate views. Palin&amp;#039;s star has flown, and with it the far right/Tea Party&amp;#039;s moment of glory. The caribou (after much effort by Palin) is cooked. My fellow Editors are right that we as a country get what we vote for. But it&amp;#039;s worth noting that among what we voted for are a center-left president, a moderate Republican from Sarah Palin&amp;#039;s home state, and a host of both purists and pragmatists, of conservative Democrats and libertarian Republicans, of people who at one moment seems hidebound in their partisanship and at the next surprise us with their independence. Collins, Snowe, Burr, Hatch, Kirk, Paul (R-TX), Paul (R-KY), Lugar, Murkowski, Flake, Nelson (D-NE), Webb, Tester, Manchin, Sanchez, DeMint: there are many in Congress who do not fit and do not follow the Manichean model of two-party politics. I expect to hear more from and about them in the next two years. I expect that much will get done because of them. And I expect that this two-line assessment of 2010 will be vindicated: The Republicans won the battle. And the president won the war. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/news/a9090/2010-lunacy-obscures-sanity/>