Brownstein is identifying a fault line, not creating it, let alone endorsing it. He raises points that are well worth discussing. But I wince at such a catchy depiction of polarization – even though Brownstein is right about the way particularly wealthy white seniors have gobbled up resources for themselves while denying them to others.

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Time magazine named President Obama its 2012 "Person of the Year," and it makes sense. Just two years ago he came out of the 2010 shellacking battered, his chance at a second term diminished. Instead he put together an astonishing coalition of America's future, and became the first president in 75 years to win more than 50 percent of the vote twice. Aware of historic second-term overreach, most notably when George W. Bush tried to privatize Social Security, Obama says he nonetheless has an ambitious agenda for the next four years.

It would be sad if he launched it by doing what Bush never did: cutting Social Security benefits for seniors by agreeing to a change in cost of living calculations called the chained CPI.

Once a topic for only the wonkiest of wonks, now the intricacies of the chained CPI are being debated by the hackiest of hacks. The bottom line is this: The longer you live, the less your benefits would grow. We still don't know how it would work; anonymous White House sources have promised any deal would include protections for the poorest seniors, the disabled and veterans.

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Well, obviously Democrats won the election, holding the White House, increasing their lead in the Senate and picking up seats in the House. But while some Republicans promised to commence soul-searching about why most Americans rejected their message, their right-wing flank, and the plutocrats who fund them, are only getting crazier. That leaves victorious Democrats looking for ways to placate them, instead of looking for ways to exercise their mandate. This seems wrong.

I mean, how do you explain the phenomenon of President Obama winning Michigan by 10 points, and the state GOP's very next political move is passing unpopular right-to-work legislation in a lame duck session, before they concede seats to Democrats (and some less crazy Republicans) in January? That flies in the face of the way the political system is supposed to work. The electorate speaks; their servants listen.

But instead, Gov. Rick Snyder, who once promised not to back right-wing right-to-work legislation, instead backed rushing it through, to applause from his friends at ALEC, Americans for Prosperity and the Koch brothers. The point is to slash wages as well as to defund an institutional pillar of the Democratic Party. No retreat, no surrender.

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I supported Hillary Clinton in 2008. Smarter people than I believe she will run in 2016, despite her protests, and I mostly hope she does. Chances are I would support her again. There is no other strong certain candidate in the field. Vice President Biden and New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo are likely to stay out of the race if she runs. Maryland Gov. Martin O'Malley probably would, or should, too. He doesn't have the stature to successfully challenge her. And there's no obvious liberal or progressive star to date. Talk about a run by, say, Massachusetts Sen.-elect Elizabeth Warren seems premature to me, as much as I admire her: Let's give her a little time in the Senate to make a difference before pushing her onto the national stage. Of course, it's still quite early, and an inspiring figure may well emerge who could give Clinton an energetic run from the left. Almost nobody was betting on Sen. Barack Obama on Dec. 4, 2005. So we'll see.

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One day, when he was in his teens, he said to himself, “Look here, Skinch Painter, this old world owes you a living, and all you’ve got to do is collect it.” Wandering the Ozarks of Missouri, he inhabited a cave and relied on nature for his food and clothing. He hunted, fished and gathered nuts and berries, wearing only animal skins and going barefoot.

“Labor is a useless sin,” said Skinch. “The time a man spends working is just so much time lost from living.”

We can just about see Fox News sending a camera crew out to interview Skinch, and one of its handsomely paid straight men wrapping up the piece with an offhand, “See, you don’t need government handouts. If you don’t want to work, you can do what this guy does. At least he’s not a taker. The rest of us in this country, we’ll continue to work for a living.”

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“Just to close loopholes is far too little money,” Pelosi said in the interview. “If it’s going to bring in revenue, the president has been very clear that the higher income people have to pay their fair share.”

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Estimates suggest that, between political party spending and super PAC largess around the presidential and congressional races, this past election cost as much as $6 billion.  That is just astonishing.  And astonishingly wasteful.

Karl Rove alone raised and spent upward of $400 million to influence the election.  Instead, Rove and the hidden donors behind his super PAC could have given over $1,500 to every unemployed person in Virginia — that is, he could have actually done something good with the money, and maybe won the state.  Leave aside the fact that Republicans oppose unemployment assistance; the point is, our electoral spending is wildly out of proportion with the realities of voters and even the proportions of the recent past.  In 2004, the record $1 billion in campaign spending made headlines and set records.  Now we’ve eclipsed that sixfold.

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The top priority for Congress as it reconvenes this week is to deal with the so-called fiscal cliff, and progressives are worried that Obama and congressional Democrats may agree to a “grand bargain” that includes cuts to social safety net programs, especially Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, or gives a tax break to the wealthy.

Progressive activists are now preparing to turn the firepower they marshaled to reelect the president against him if he looks like he's backing down on his mandate, as they see it, to preserve the social safety net and raise taxes on the wealthy.

“Our members are really really fired up to fight alongside of him and fight Republicans who are holding the economy hostage,” Ilya Sheyman of MoveOn.org told Salon. “But at the same time, it is also true that we have a very clear bright line from our members on Social Security and Medicare. That’s the top priority for our membership and we’re staying fully mobilized.”

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Building on last year’s successful referendum campaign to overturn collective bargaining attacks in Ohio, the AFL-CIO racked up 80,000 volunteer shifts and 2 million voter contacts in the state. An all-out labor effort also helped deliver victory for labor stalwarts like Elizabeth Warren and Tammy Baldwin. While unions’ effort to write collective bargaining rights into Michigan’s constitution fell flat, they beat back well-funded anti-union measures in Michigan and California that their enemies would love to take national.

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Here's what we do know: Obama won a very close election with lower voter turnout than 2008 and a much more slender margin of victory. Democrats kept the Senate with a slightly more liberal caucus, and Republicans kept the House. Those are the facts.

There are two narratives being told about what happened: One, Obama won this with a savvy, data-driven reelection campaign and a bare-bones, if effective, first term of policymaking; two, this election represents the rise of a left-wing, black, brown and young America, an America opposed to rampant inequality and racism.

These two narratives have important differences. The first implies a continuation of the centrist policies and rising inequality of Obama's first term. The second implies a sharp left turn on policymaking.

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If there’s one thing that I try to emphasize to people about American Madisonian democracy, it’s that chances to really effect change are usually found within the parties. Sure, general elections are important, but they tend to ride on large, impersonal forces. Sure, activism can make a difference in November, but usually just around the margins. The Democrats' get-out-the-vote operation this cycle was by all accounts incredibly effective, and yet my guess is that when all is said and done, at the very best it might have moved the ball a point or two in key states … so if you devoted your time and energy to that it made a difference, but only a relatively small one. Or, to put it another way: Sheldon Adelson dropped a whole lot of money on this election, and it didn’t seem to buy anything much.

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From the 1970s to the present, American politics has been driven by the backlash against the two liberal revolutions of the mid-20th century — the New Deal economic revolution and the Civil Rights Revolution and the attendant wave of cultural liberalization.  In 1968, Alabama Gov. George Wallace led many working-class whites upset with racial integration and the '60s cultural revolution out of the Democratic Party.  From the 1970s until recently, these working-class white “Reagan Democrats” — socially conservative, pro-military and suspicious of government in the abstract, while fond of government benefits — were the swing voters in national elections for whom Reagan Republicans and Clintonian New Democrats competed.

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Sure, President Obama did effectively use his massive campaign war chest to eke out a much-needed victory here, but that not-so-surprising result is not the big news in a region whose demographics and population growth make it a vision of America's political future. Instead, the big square-state story is that a once-dominant Republican Party is utterly marginalized, an autocratic, top-down Democratic Party establishment is at the mercy of its activist base, and the state's corporate elite are no longer able to fully dictate political destiny.

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I called up Ned Foley, professor at The Ohio State University’s Moritz College of Law and director of Election Law @ Moritz, a bipartisan center on electoral procedure, to guide me through the wilderness.

Foley, it should be noted, thinks that the possibility we won’t know the winner of the presidential race by late Tuesday night or early Wednesday morning is “quite unlikely,” despite the fact that the chattering classes have been talking about Ohio as this year’s potential Florida.

That being said, semper paratus (always ready).

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This apparent contradiction has led puzzled academics to different conclusions: Some insist the public is becoming strongly polarized, while others believe the phenomenon is largely limited to the political and media elite. Political scientist Lilliana Mason’s analysis is more subtle, and more disturbing.

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Say what you will about Brown—and plenty has been said about the liberalbête noire of national conservatives during this election cycle—but the man certainly has his own distinct brand of business casual. And in his fierce race to maintain his Senate seat against Republican State Treasurer Josh Mandel, it just might be Brown’s brand of who-gives-a-hoot sartorial schlump and off-the-cuff crankiness that is winning Ohio voters over.

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The Republicans, symbolized by Romney’s decision during the debates to offer an echo, bear a major share of the blame for the muddle.  We nonetheless have a fairly good sense that if Romney were to win, and if he were to bring the Senate along with him, he would etch a new sketch and make a sharp turn to the right.  If Obama, by contrast, hammers out an Electoral College victory, we have little idea what he will do.  Because the Republicans opted not to display their conservatism during the election, Obama was under no obligation to defend his liberalism.

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I think public policy is extremely important, and I do believe that a president’s skills, interests and personality can affect his or her success in office. Yet I think that’s the wrong way to go about making this sort of choice.

On Tuesday, I'll be voting for … the candidate nominated by my party.

Indeed, that’s my strong advice to everyone: figure out which party you would prefer to see in the White House, and vote for that candidate, and every other candidate nominated by that party. Doesn't matter who the particular candidates are, what you think of them as people, or as politicians, or anything else. Pick a party and stick with it. That's it.

Given the way U.S. politics works in 2012, one would have to be nuts to do anything else.

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As one successful investment manager says, “Luck matters in the short term, but skill matters in the long term.” The implication is that Americans looking for skillful economic leadership from the White House would be better served by considering the long-term economic performance of Democratic and Republican presidents rather than the vagaries of the past four years.

Even the simple-seeming question of whether America is better off now than when President Obama took office hides important complexities. Our economy survived what could have been another Great Depression and is now growing, albeit slowly. GDP and the stock market are up; but unemployment remains painfully high, and most people’s real incomes are lower than they were four years ago.

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