Should definitely be at the table.

Those people who were fanatical Hillary supporters are less likely to be grudging supporters of Obama. Not that the election showed this decisively harmed Obama . . . it did not.

It also suggests that Obama is quite willing to share the stage. I don't doubt that he does not mind being upstaged at certain moments, so long as he achieves his policy objectives. I suspect he will use this dynamic as a political and power resource. How he will play this dynamic will be positively entertaining.

When we were up against sound finance and the Treasury view, we had to argue that any expenditure is better than none. Dig holes in the ground and fill them again, paint the Black Forest white; if men cannot be paid wages for doing something sensible, pay them to do something silly.

It is best if pay people to do sensible things, but if we have them do silly things, that is better than nothing. BUT, bailing out finance firms that use the money for strategic acquisitions, or send the money overseas does not of this. Since we appear to have no controls over the expenditures of those loans Paulson has made, the money may truly we wasted. It certainly won't stimulate demand by putting wages in peoples pockets.

Nice to see he has a "camp" now!

On the other hand, if cloture on a key vote fails by one, and it is Lieberman's vote, well . . .

I note that Mr. Reich manages to elide monetary policy, and for good reason.

This is going to be ONE HELL of a REACTION to the purported laissez faire ideology we have been subjected to during the Reagan to Bush Era.

Will the reaction be as extraordinary as the New Deal reaction to the 1920's? Stay tuned . . .

Everyone enjoy. Enjoy. Enjoy.

Because we have a LOT of work to do. This has just started.

But tonight I am rejoicing!

In brief, critical realignment theory begins with the premise of a vibrant social and economic system paired with a relatively static political system: our Constitution is an 18th Century document, and sets up a rather antique division of labor in the political branches. It purposely makes it difficult to effect new political programs. Once a party gets in power, it tends to do things to perpetuate that power, contributing to stasis. Given the vibrant social and economic system it is paired with, the political party system is prone of periodic upheavals.

The upheavals in the past have been tied to the elections of Andrew Jackson, Abraham Lincoln, William McKinley, and FDR. Each of these is identified with an era of politics that persisted for a good thirty to forty years of so. Thus we can identify the "Age of Jackson", or the New Deal Era.

One of the controversies (among many) of more recent developments is what happened to the purported next realigning election. It was due to occur around 1968 or so. But that saw the continuation of Democrats in Congress, paired with Nixon. It does not look like a "classic" realignment. And then we must question whether the Reagan era fits within this rubric as well. Some argue that 1968 was a sort of realignment: it indicated a decline in trust for government. Others pin the end of the New Deal era with the imploding of the Carter Administration and the rise of Reaganism, centered on the election of 1980. Complicating these assessments is the change in voting patters of Southerners. Before 1964, no respectable Southerner would vote Republican. The shift to conservative Republicanism by Southerners took a generation, but by the mid-1990's the shift was pretty much complete. Note that realignment theory suggests a rapid change in political alignments, and the change in party affiliation of southern conservatives involved a number of shocks as well as gradual change. Phil Gramm's conversion to the Republican Party after having first been elected as a Texas Democrat is symptomatic of this.

What does this suggest for the present? We cannot know whether this will be a realigning election. But I suspect it will be. And race is again an issue. But in this case it will be race as a redepemption of the sins of our political and social history. That sin will die with convulsions. That is what we are seeing right now: the use of race code words to scare people from voting for Obama. If it does not work, then the likelihood of doing this in the future decreases. If an Obama administration is successful, then the power of such appeals will be lessened.

More to the point as to the general significance of the Obama Administration, it will likely have an extraordinary opportunity to attempt to reconstruct American politics. This is the lesson of other reconstructionist presidents: Jackson, Lincoln, FDR, Reagan. What exactly will be the program it is difficult to know. We could not have known what FDR would do, during the election of 1932. After all, his National Recovery Act of the first New Deal placed business and labor under the supervision of Government approved industry codes. That amounted to national corporatism, and was struck down by the Supreme Court. Only then did we see the National Labor Relations Act and Social Security (both 1935 acts).

We are at a game changing moment. The faith in free market economics is gone -- one need note only Greenspan's recent comments to be sure of this. What will follow is not clear. But I have immense faith in this man Obama. He is incredibly smart. And he knows that, if elected, he will have immense opportunity to reconstruct American politics, building on what exists at this moment in history. And I look forward to seeing this happen.

Secondly, I strongly suspect there will be a MASSIVE increase in voter participation. Turnout will be a big jump from 2004 (59%), which was a big jump up from 2000. This is a mobilization. Such mobilizations are rare in American political history. Turnout in the 1880's reached 85% for presidential years (and think, these people were not college educated for the most part--whereas today we expect turnout to increase with education--but I digress). Turnout declined steadily for a variety of reasons, including the introduction of the Australian ballot (secret ballots instead of publicly visible ballots, which begins in 1890), the spread of the white-only primary in the South (begins in 1890, along with poll taxes and literacy tests). Turnout expands significantly in 1932, which was the FDR realignment. It then will steadily decline slightly, dropping off more significantly around 1968, where there was an increase of distrust in government amidst the Vietnam War. Watergate merely increased this distrust.

The Reagan era showed a voter turnout of about 55% or so in most presidential elections, with a margin of error of plus or minus 3%. It declined slowly.

The Obama phenomenon will almost certainly smash recent records for turnout (just a hunch at this point--although polls suggest this is correct. And this will confound many pollsters, because they are generally not accounted for in their stratified samples.

The new voters will almost certainly be systematically different the old voters. They will almost certainly be Obama voters. And we (I hope) will witness a LANDSLIDE of HISTORIC proportions (think in terms of Andrew Jackson and FDR).

He is not really honorable. He never has been. He just claims to be -- e.g., after all, he didn't support campaign finance reform until after he was caught as one of the Keating Five.

He doesn't know very much. He never did. He just talks to TV cameras. So when policies get to specifics, he rambles, gives talking points, doesn't concern himself with consistency or mastery of concepts. Because he can't.

There is a reason why he finished at the bottom of his class in Annapolis.

He is OUT OF HIS LEAGUE (and don't even get me started about Palin).