The President yesterday:

I’m pretty sure I’ll take some actions that some in Congress will not like. That’s natural. That’s how our democracy works.

I have a lot of criticisms on the way many Democratic candidates campaigned, ranging from running away from the President, to not making clear the differences between the two parties, to simply being scared of the dark money in politics. Having said that, we have all been here before. There is a documented history of 6 year midterm elections going back to the civil war. There were two exceptions. 1998 & 2002, with Bill Clinton and George W Bush. 1998 involved impeachment and the backlash from Americans, 2002 involved us in a war/conflict (let's leave it at that). We have seen this political situation before.

The thing is, politics and social change never end. It does go from cycle to cycle and Americans are a fickle bunch. There are answers and there are huge problems to surmount. Getting the grotesque amounts of dark money out of politics would be a very good start, but so will nominating better and stronger candidates. That part is difficult without money. It's a dysfunctional circle.

Dysfunctional or not, the alternative is far worse.

We've been here before, we can get through it again. Quitting is not an option. That is the opposite of actually being a part of making things better. Elections - local, city, state, and federal - happen every year, and every year there are winners and losers. That is the way it goes.

As BobR mentioned yesterday, now the other side will have to govern; What they do and how they will do it remains to be seen but if the past 6 hers are any indication (and most people with common sense know this) it doesn't look like it will be fun to watch. I take hope that in 2010 we actually tossed out a good number of conservative Dems, Sure they were replaced by the Tea Party, but in the next two years I see this wave coming to a fruition where people will finally see that they do not know how governing works. Things will shift as they have done since the founding of this Nation.

It's a new cycle, and so it goes….

and

Raine