In 2000, we had the victory of a man and his machine. A raw exercise in power politics, which rested on a breath of the media wind on a still spinning coin, and the hard reality that all roads leaded to a rubber stamp Five in the court, and a House that would have elected anyone they were told to if he was the Republican standard bearer. It brought us a festival of failure, and a carnival of catastrophe. That error will be with us for a long time, but it is wheezing it's last breaths.

Tonight marks the formation, not just of a new government, but a New Majority. Predictions of the deaths of history, partisanship, or ideology are always premature. Ours is a government, as Madison said it, of interest against interest. But it is also a Union, as Wilson argued, of accountability. With this election the new majority in America has, for the second time in two elections, spoken. It is poised to be a sweeping victory in almost every category of the Federal government. The Democrats have 6 pick ups all but certain in the Senate, and as many as 9 very possible. Between 20 and 35 House seats will fall to the Democratic Party, and at the top of the ticket, the Presidential nominee, Barack Obama, could well achieve the most powerful popular vote total in more than 30 years, and the largest electoral total for a Democrat since LBJ's smashing 1964 victory. History is not only written, but made, by winners.

There are those who would deny this new majority it's place. They would have it be a conservative down tick, a swing against the great tide to a right wing nation. However, every indication, from the polls beloved of political science - virtually all voters surveyed though their taxes were going up, but wanted government to do more - to the more subtle changes in tenor. The forces of the right, which as recently as 2004 crowed their electoral, political, social, economic, and moral superiority, are not circling the wagons. Humiliated by an erratic Presidential nominee, and a vice-presidential nominee who has turned her rallies into bonfires of the humanities.

The New Majority drives what is becoming a revolution in political affairs. That revolution is, as most are at first, equivocal, crowded by cries to turn back, stand still, or look away. But the progressive wing of American politics is not the wing of ideas. The centrists have tried throwing paper money at problems, and begging for all who were in place to stay in place. The result is a global economy that continues to spiral downward into the most severe recession in recent memory. With every day, with every hour, with every minute, the untenable nature of a world that consumes more than it produces, of a global economy locked in a cycle of a culture of deficits, is being more clear. From here forward, we must be the surplus society, one that gives back to the future, more than it takes. It will be a hard battle.

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One barrier will be those, who in the name of false economy, would rob promises made to the poor, the old, the sick, the wounded - promises made to veterans, workers, home makers, and dependents - in order to finance more bloated current consumption. They will talk of deficits, but what they really see is a Social Security surplus ready to be robbed.

Another barrier will be those who are not ready to face a new 21st century of a more glittering and global America. An America that does not care about the gender of a person's spouse, the color of their skin, the origin of their birth, or the private conscience of their spiritual search. An America which is ready to reach out to the world, and take in from the world. An America that builds nations, rather than bullies them.

But the most important barrier will be with in the New Majority itself, a lack of confidence, a trepidation. In 1992 America put Bill Clinton and the Democratic Party in charge of government, and then two years later, swept them out. The problem was corruption, and corrosive paralysis. A party in power that was compromised, because it would not do what needed to be done. America, of that momnent, was not ready, just as it was not ready in the Cleveland administration to change its direction. But 16 long years have passed, and the only way out, is forward. We cannot have 1992 back, nor 1996, nor 1998, nor 200, nor 2004.

What is the composition of this New Majority? What is it's basic principle? The same as it has been since it fumbled in the dark of 2002 for a New Politics: urgency. The New Majority wants more than change - it craves effective action. It is not the creation of a man, nor the product of his machine. Obama is to be the President, but he can produce no more peace than we, the people, will pay for, provide no more prosperity than we, the people, will work for. He can have no more courage than we provide the cover for. He can do no more than we allow. It will not be a few men in a room that remake the American economy, but the efforts of millions by million, day by day. A billion times a day in America people will have to decide between the past and the future, and it will be the sum of all of those decisions which makes a new nation.

It was in his convention acceptance speech that Barack Obama said that we are a better nation than this. A better nation than one that invades illegally, occupies immorally, and leaves unceremoniously. A better nation than leaves millions without access to medicine, doctors, and nurses. A better nation than one that will cook the planet, for a trifle of comfort today. But if we are to be a better nation than this, we must act as one. Obama cannot make us a great nation again, even if he has the stuff of greatness in him. However, if we become a great nation again on his watch, he will rightly be remembered a great President. That is what Presidents do: the bring out the greatness that is in the American spirit.

America has been born in revolution, beset in expansion, riven by civil war, nearly defeated by depression, threatened with extinction. We have spent a generation in pursuit of folly, with a majority that decided that we should never pay today what can be borrowed against tomorrow. The old political realm is still alive, and with us, but it no longer will rule us. Americans were bombarded by the old media for 8 long years about how George W Bush was popular, powerful, and right. Time Magazine gave practically a coronation ode in 2000, when he took the office on a whisper and the whipping in back rooms. And yet, we have come, in the end, to refuse to believe in that which cannot be believed in. He has become a figure of ridicule, because he is ridiculous. We have endured the most odious regime in the White House since the days of Jim Crow, and the Gilded Age corruption.

On this night, that is at an end. But though that era of politics has seen it's last days, it still plans to lash us in its last hours. The next three months will see a mad rush to loot even to the ultimate moment. The evil that this era has done will live on, and those who grew fat on it's fruits will eagerly wish for its return at any moment when the will is weak. We will have to remember the dead of Katrina, the lost years in the sands of Iraq. We will have hanging over us the sword of financial Damocles. In such moments it is important for a people to form covenants so that the insanity of the past, does not become the inevitability of the future. Palin, and a host of others like her, await their turn at the political table. That which events have given, inattention to events can take away. Those who claim to be "conservative" will cling to the corners of American discourse, pumped by billionaire's largess, and fear. Americans, however, are no longer conservatives, because the era just ended, is taking almost everything away from them. One cannot be a conservative, if there is nothing left to conserve.

Americans understand now that modern conservatism was the ideology of defeat, denial, deficits, and destruction. That it spoke with high principles in from it's mouth, but governed from a much lower orifice. That it proclaimed itself the Kingdom of God, and produced hell on earth. It has created almost every dollar of debt owed by this country, and left us behind with nothing but hulking sprawl and a public that is feeling the vice of collapse from every side. To be a conservative, has meant to be an apologist for torture, for theft, for incompetence, and for a constitution of conspiracy.

There is no time to waste, the measurements of this moment leave no dimension for dallying with half-truths, half-measures, or half-witted attempts to stave off a vast and transformative era in American politics. The America that was is gone, and it is better that it is so. The America that is coming will be different in tastes, habits, and morals. Whether for better or for worse is now in the hands of Americans, and America is now in the hands of this New Majority, and that New Majority is united in at least one belief: that we are a better nation than this. That we have been, should be, and shall be again.

Either that, or we will no longer be at all.