Me, An Optimist?!

"It's snowing still," said Eeyore gloomily.
"So it is."

"And freezing."

"Is it?"

"Yes," said Eeyore. "However," he said, brightening up a little, "we haven't had an earthquake lately."

Nobody has ever called me an optimist. Not once in my entire Eeyorian life. So, by all accounts, I should be slumped into my soup on this gray, chilly, post-Midterm Elections day. And I'm not feeling gloomy at all. Not at all! "And why not?," you naturally ask. What's got me feeling positively excited today? I'm not sure, really, and maybe I'm nuts, but these things come to mind:

The Republicans did not take the Senate, thanks to the horrible/laughable candidacies of Christine O'Donnell and Sharron Angle. O'Donnell was just silly, but Angle was malignant and I'm glad I won't be stumbling across her in the news for a while. It's a relief. Yeah, we have to deal with Rand Paul, but there's just something so squirrelly about the guy, I can hardly wait for the scandals to start rolling in! That's a prediction.

The House doesn't have the muscle to wreck Obama's foreign policy all by itself.  Despite Marc Lynch's hand-wringing over the message the election sends to foreign leaders--his fears that Netanyahu will be emboldened to hang tough, that Iran may conclude that Obama can no longer bargain in good faith--there's hope in the tea party's fiscal agenda when it comes to troop draw-downs in Afghanistan and more targeted uses of foreign aid. It's possible, as John Norris points out at "Foreign Policy" that the tea party's insistence on spending cuts could work to the benefit of Progressive foreign policy.

With the Blue Dogs' muzzled, December might bring a more productive Lame Duck Session.  I expect to see Don't Ask; Don't Tell shot down permanently. Michelle Bachmann is worried about the Bush-era tax cuts...and I love it when she's worried. A renewable energy standard that will require utilities to source 15% of their energy from renewable sources by 2021 has a chance now, I hope. Social Security recipients may get that one-time, $250.00 they need. And another extension of unemployment benefits is likely to pass. And the DREAM Act, which Harry Reid pledged to push in this session regardless of the outcome of his own election, should finally be put to the vote.

Most of all, I'm chomping at the bit for 2012. I've been reading the pundits' predictions all day--some Eeyores, some Tiggers--and here's the one I like the best, from David Von Drehle of Time Magazine,

What comes next is anyone's guess. Can we take heart from the fact that Florida's mouthiest Congressman, freshman Alan Grayson, was trounced after calling his opponent "Taliban Dan" in an egregious television ad? Can we find hope in the fact that a surging politician — the early Tea Party adopter Marco Rubio — can still get away, in this climate, with calling his campaign-trail foes "gracious ... worthy opponents"?

Probably not. The election of 2010, momentous as it was, marks the beginning of a bigger battle — not the end. It presents, in the words of Rubio, who won Florida's Senate seat, "a second chance for Republicans to be what they said they were going to be not so long ago." That is, the party of smaller solutions and lower spending.

It also presents Obama with a fresh opportunity. The Republican Party has won the midterms by moving to the right. That leaves the rest of the spectrum wide open. If Obama can settle his differences with moderate voters and seize ownership of the middle ground, he will find a lot of the electorate waiting patiently for him.*

You see, the story of huge midterm losses is shelved in the library of political campaigns right next to the tale of presidential comebacks. Barack Obama just lived through the first edition, and starting today will try to create the sequel.

 *Emphasis, most emphatically, energetically mine.