Liberals have no stranglehold on virtue.

I think the liberal/conservative debate outdated.

We need honesty and inegrity.

Certainly the liberal wing is the base of the Democratic party, but Dems won control of congress because of the smaller but important contribution conservative democrats and independants made this time. That's the point this guy is making. Lose sight of this and dems go back to bitching on the sidelines, at least down south.

Just my opinion.

I did inhale.

Americans voted against Republicanism. They voted against conservative and reactionary policies. They did not vote for Rahm's right wing moderation.

Connecticut is, in this election, an enigma, given your supposition (which I agree with, generally speaking).But Lieberman's victory really is one I do not understand; in virtually every other race here, your statement holds true. Democrats did an incredible job rallying their forces but it still wasn't enough to get Lamont, whom I saw as one of the most vocal and vehement anti-Republican candidates, into office.

We're stuck with a schmuck.

Rahm Emmanuel is misreading the results. People like Bob Casey may have conservative views on social matters, but they chose to run as Democrats. That suggests they are aligned with the party on major issues relating to the war, deficit spending, a minimum wage hike, etc. They chose to put their moral issues on the backburner, and it seems to be clear that they don't expect to single-handedly change Democratic policies on abortion or same sex marriage.

None of the exit polling suggests moral issues were uppermost in the mind of the voters, either. Why should the Democratic Party now feel forced to move to the right? The public seems tired of government intrusion in these areas and it just may be time to stay with the status quo (e.g. with abortion), or get the government out of the way (as with stem cell research).

The bigger shift that has taken place is that moderate and liberal Democrats have been elected in many parts of the country, and in this sense Ian is right that it is these Democrats who matter much more than the conservative Democrats that were elected. Look, for example, at the Northeast. There is not one Republican representative from Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts or Rhode Island. In New York, at least four Republican incumbents were thrown out, and the losses in Connecticut would have been just as deep if Christopher Shays hadn't held on. And where is he going to be in the new House? He is one of the few moderate Republican House members left - even Jim Leach from Iowa lost in an upset. Shays ought to be thinking seriously of becoming a Democrat because he has no home in his own party.

Northeast Republican senators are just as endangered. People like Olympia Snow exist because they are moderates. She is one of a handful of Republican senators left in the Northeast, and rather than talk about Blue Dog Democrats, Emmanuel should be thinking about Red Dog Republicans. It is time to either invite them into the party or at least build a coalition of the few that are left in the Senate in order to push legislation through.

What has happened then, is that we are witnessing the emergence of the solid Democratic Northeast, a counterbalance to the solid Republican South. This has gone completely unnoticed by the pundits.

Add to this the beginnings of a two-party balance in the Great Lakes states, or as with Illinois, a solid Democratic majority, and you can see the possibility of yet another swath of the country going permanently blue. What was a deeply Republican state like Indiana can no longer be described as a sure thing for the Republicans at all.

Slowly but surely, the Republicans are being encircled in their Southern redoubt. This is the price they will pay for their Lee Atwater Southern strategy. Look at it this way: they used racism to hold on to a Senate seat in Tennessee, but that element of intolerance is so anathema to the rest of the country that they lost other Senate seats around the country, and they have given up their chance of being a national party.