The Clock Is Ticking

So says the astute political analyst Ezra Klein in a New York Times op-ed this morning. He’s referring to the tendency of mid-presidential term cycles to produce a reaction. This is what happened in the 2010 election, when the Democrats’s two-year grip on the House and Senate abruptly ended in what president Obama called a shellacking. Today, Democratic dominance in the House and Senate is much thinner than it was when Obama was elected 2008. A return to Trumpism-McConnellism two years from now, even without Trump himself, would be a catastrophe for the nation. Klein rightly says the Democrats will have to accomplish a lot, and their accomplishments must be clearly visible to the electorate, and, despite the filibuster-constraint in the senate, they’ve got less than two years to do it.