The Big Dog…

…barks at the moon.

The beauty of the Democratic Party midterm victory, Clinton muses, is that voters said no to ideology. They wanted to move past fearmongering and demonizing toward true debate. "America rejected shorthand," he says. "People are thinking again." But they are not thinking of a set of liberal policy prescriptions. He argues that the election was about more than Iraq and corruption; it turned on the unmet needs of middle-class voters for whom the country "isn't working anymore." And yet no one is exactly sure how to make it work again. "The people didn't give Democrats a mandate," the former president cautions. "They gave us a chance."

This, of course, is largely self (and spousal) serving nonsense. It's true that the "unmet needs of middle-class voters" was an important factor in the outcome of the elections, but by supporting Democratic candidates, voters explicitly supported a range of "liberal policy prescriptions." From a raise in the minimum wage to sane and humane immigration policy to repairing the destructive effects of Clintonian "free" trade policies, to restoring progressivity to the tax code and preserving Social Security to the degree that the election was nationalized on middle-class economics, the solutions offered were time-honored liberal prescriptions. In some cases (notably the upper left's own Maria Cantwell's) the field was broadened to include issues like executive compensation, excess profits and corporate fraud. This Congress is firmly within the New Deal/Fair Deal/Great Society tradition, the very legacy which Bill Clinton's "New Democat" politics spurned. I'm sure that it's hard to veiw such a profound rejection of his goals for the partyu as a mandate, but if the new House majority isn't commanding enough for the Clintons, the surprise success in the Senate should confirm that a mandate is exactly what we have, and it's not a mandate for a return to some Platonic ideal of a Clintonian center.

Of course, that's why this, however farfetched, must not, and, I'm confident, will not be allowed to come to pass...

But a chance to do what? To compromise with the president to achieve something to show voters the next time? Or to lay out an agenda to run on in the 2008 campaign? (The first cattle-call primary debates, if you can believe it, are only six or seven months away.) The answer will be some of both, of course, with the calibration of the two approaches determined as much by Hillary Clinton and her husband as by Nancy Pelosi or Harry Reid.

Hillary Clinton is a junior Senator and her husband is retired. The points of compromise and points of conflict should be, and I'm sure shall be, determined by our elected leadership.