John Ellis: “The coming Democratic purge will be helpful. Getting rid of Terry Mac and Gephardt and eventually Daschle would, in an ideal Democratic scenario, happen sooner rather than later. More important, 2002 ends the whole 2000-we-won-even-though-we-lost dementia. Last night, the country essentially ratified Bush’s victory in 2000.
The upside of being completely out of power in Washington is that it requires Democrats to think much more imaginatively about the most important issues facing the country. They’ve been cast out into the wilderness. The wilderness is where parties are reinvented, reimagined and reengineered. Standing for nothing except political advantage leads, inevitably, to defeat. Standing for something is the road back.”