Obama's victory is symbolic.  To advance the progressive agenda, we still need more.  First, we need to build a larger majority, particularly in the Senate.  It is time to make Republicans not merely the party that is out of power, but no longer a substantial party at all.

The Republicans help us on this agenda every time they promote the agenda of the religious right.  The religious right is not a majority or anything like a majority in this country.   They hated being "used" by the banker party (traditional Republicanism), but without the bankers they are nobody at all.  They could achieve a certain amount of unity with underlying racist appeals, but the fact is school integration in the 1950s has achieved its objective, which is undermining the social fear that kept racism alive.  Most racists are dying off.  So the Republican religio-racist party is the KKK of the current era, an ever shrinking, but never completely eradicated, irrelevant minority.  Let them keep moving in their radical religio-racist direction, it only drives away every reasonable person who might otherwise be attracted to the Laissez-faire banker party.  The Laissez-faire party members are typically social libertarians and do not want to be subjected to public-prudism in their personal lives.  When forced to choose, as the religio-racists now demand, they will risk a little less Laissez-faireism in favor of retaining their personal freedom.

So, our goal for 2010 should be 65-68 Democratic Senators, maybe a few more.  That is a tall order, but not impossible.  We need to absolutely focus on the seven to ten most easily defeated Republican Senators and start building the campaign *now.*

We have a completely different job in the House.  There we need to focus on rightwing Democrats, DINOs.  We will never have a progressive party if we depend on religio-racists or Laissez-faireists.  Every Democrat should be a progressive.  At the moment we more room to reform the party itself on the House side.  It is time to make a list of the 50 most offensive DEMOCRATIC members of the HOUSE and begin to mount the campaign to replace them in the 2010 primaries.  The party needs to become more progressive and to do that, the party needs new blood.  We can work on that with the Senators, too, but our room to operate is much narrower, we are still building a sustained majority in the Senate.  In the House we can build a list of the 30 most offensive Republicans, to remove, but that is secondary to building progressive movement among the Democrats.

The time to act is now.  What we just won was a minor skirmish; we still have many rounds before progressivism is the face of America.