By "it", of course, I refer to the great post-election debate: why did we win? Far more importantly, now that we did win, what should we do now?
I have been predicting for six months now that on the Thursday after the election, assuming a win, we would start hearing from conservative Democrats and the establishment punditocracy about how we need to go slow, not over-reach, be careful. The only thing I was wrong about was the timing: with Obama clearly ahead in the polls, the not-overreaching calls began early, and have been well-chronicled on the pages of OpenLeft. Many of these calls, actually most now that I think about it, include references to Bill Clinton's "over-reach" in 1993-94 that caused the Democrats' downfall in the 1994 elections. This post, written from the perspective of someone who was in the Clinton White House and who studied in detail what happened in the 1994 elections, will walk through why this argument is dangerously wrong for Obama and the Democrats in 2009.
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