WHEW

Well, that was fun.  How do I love thee?  Let me count the ways:

Barack Obama joins Bill Clinton as the only Democrats since Roosevelt to win two full terms as President.

Elizabeth Warren can serve as Senator from Massachusetts for the rest of her natural life.

Barack Obama will appoint one, two, or even three Supreme Court justices.

Tammy Baldwin is the first openly gay senator in American history [but not, needless to say, the first gay senator.]

Allan West and Joe Walsh are gone.

For the first time, same sex marriage won a state referendum.

And we need never, ever again think about Mitt Romney and his entire extended, entitled family.  We need not wonder what is in his tax returns, we need not obsess about his car elevator, we need not puzzle out the more obscure bizarreries of the Church of Latter Day Saints.

Sufficient unto the day. 

Now comes the really difficult question:  What can those of us on the left do, starting now, to apply steady and effective pressure for progressive legislation and presidential action?  We have not entered the Promised Land.  We have simply managed to avoid the path to Hell.

We do not need fantasies of perfectly round islands with neatly imagined economic arrangements -- what Marx called Utopian Socialism.  We live in a nation 49% of whose voting citizens chose Mitt Romney.  That quite nicely defines the limits of the possible.  Now is the time to start building organizations, coalitions, movements that can have some hope of moving America to the left. 

But first, I need some sleep.