Moving Forward: Election 2006

Change comes in many forms, but the stronger the energy behind it, the stronger the momentum that can follow it. Last night's House victory was inspiring. So was tonight's Senate one.

Some of the Senate victories are more inspiring than others. Because the real change that can come from these particular victories, is even more exciting, more potentially helpful to the solidity of the country, socially and economically.

Like Bernie Sanders, the first true Democractic Socialist Senator, who started his DC career in the Liberty Union party, winning Vermont. Like Sherrod Brown, a populist man with whom I had the pleasure of sharing a panel chaired by Lewis Lapham (along with The Nation's John Nichols and Esther Kaplan, as well as Francis Fox Piven) two years ago, before a very different election outcome, winning Ohio.

Everyone else, you've got to gear it up a notch.

There's a ton to do. But the idea that Bush will veto anything that comes to his door should not be a deterrent. With the House majority gone, the Senate majority gone, and the man that CNN's Jack Cafferty called a war criminal, Donald Rumsfeld, gone, there aren't too many pillars for Bush to lean on. Nowhere else to hide. Hell, Cheney hasn't even shown himself to be a friend to fowl, lame or otherwise. (If we could just get him on any one of the pile of Halliburton/Iraq war frauds, we could get him 'gone' too.) Besides which, hey, impeachment is still an option.

Meanwhile, a win is not an opportunity to be complacent, it's a moment on which to build. More than anything, this election showed that our vote matters. The politicians that were given our votes, should do nothing less than make the best of them, for all of us.