Election: which point?

This post started out as thoughts on Mark 'ZenPundit' Safranski's election analysis, A tipping point or a turning point?. Then it turned into mostly just copying the whole thing and inserting a few of my comments.

Scathing rebuke:

President George W. Bush has to face the fact that he has not only been sharply reprimanded by the voters, as often happens to the Chief Executive in midterm elections, but he has squandered the lease on power the GOP had in controlling all three branches of government. Never has a party worked so long for such power, used it for so little lasting effect and lost it as quickly as have the Republicans.

Change:

[Rumsfeld's] departure - and the Democrats' own weak position despite being flushed with victory - buys the administration a breathing space to reconsider their political strategies and style from top to bottom.

This dovetails with Tom's assessment today that James Baker is now de facto SECSTATE and SECDEF .

On the opposite side, the Democrats are to be congratulated for running a smart race in a technical sense and for avoiding their usual ideological self-destruction.

TM Lutas, over on Tom's weblog, said recently that the Dems can't usually put away their scary people long enough to win. Pretty funny. But they did this time.

The Democratic leadership talked moderate, walked moderate and ran moderates in GOP-leaning states instead of sacrificial lambs hailing from the lunatic fringe of liberalism. James Webb is literally a very conservative" Reagan Democrat" who, frankly, I am more comfortable with politically than his socially conservative Republican opponent. Two years ago, if somebody told us that Democrats would elect a James Webb , Rush Limbaugh would have been doing backflips.

Now, will they act moderate, or try to act liberal?

If Pelosi and the Democrats listen to folks like Rahm Emanuel for the next two years and formulate a coherent and honest strategy on Islamist terrorism that actually involves fighting Islamist terrorists rather than patting down Scandinavian grandmothers at airports, they will be well-positioned for 2008. If the elderly liberal bulls, like Waxman, Kennedy, Leahy, Dingell and Conyers, who soon will be easing themselves into chairmanships, drive the agenda and wave " bloody shirt" leftist issues to the ecstatic ululations of the Moveon.org/DailyKos wingnut base, then 2009 will see the inauguration of President McCain.