The Easy Part Over

It's not as if a Republican had won by a single vote; ergo, no "mandate."

It is, on the other hand, a narrow escape.

This makes no difference when the narrative is pre-determined: that The American People want deficit reduction and bi-partisanship. There's plenty of concern that the former aligns with the president's goals.

Of the latter, Obama's instinct to be "the adult" has seemed all about willingness to compromise with insatiable bullies. Charles Pierce writes at length here, about history as a river that "churns up the muck from the bottom and brings it to the surface," with "backwaters so obscure that they no longer appear on modern maps."

Given the noise machine's four-year rampage of bringing up "some of the deepest muck from the river basin," it's hard to disagree when Pierce wonders if Obama, in taking an overly flattering view of the citizenry, can realize "the bottomless thirst the country has for snake oil."

But there is also the matter of willingly selling snake oil, in the forms endorsed by the owners.

And the apparent decisions that, bully pulpit be damned, truth-telling and rule of law are just too impolitic. As Pierce suggests, the president

... has granted immunity to the country by granting immunity to many of the people who did that country the most damage, whether they were the criminals within the previous administration, who tortured without conscience or spied without warrants, or whether they were the criminals within the financial sector, who rigged the game, cheated millions of ordinary people out of their money, and then escaped back into the institutions that had been Too Big to Fail and that, remarkably, came out of the scandal even bigger than they were before.

With a House gerrymandered to stay in the grasp of lunatics, impeachment will begin in January (if not sooner). The noise machine may have been caught a bit off-guard last night, but soon enough it will function as if the election had never happened.

On the very positive side: Elizabeth Warren and Tammy Baldwin, among other wins.

And passage of marriage equality measures in four states. A truly heartening sign that demographics are changing, and that this particular wedge will lose its power for more of the electorate.