Victory beckons; what will Congress look like?

Alexander Cockburn writes at 3am: Now that Ohio, Iowa and New Mexico have been declared for Obama, with Florida in the 'almost definite' column, they can break out the champagne at Obama's headquarters and start calling him Mr President. He's won.

The question now swivels at once to what sort of Congress he'll be dealing with and here too the news is good for the Democrats.

Since 1946 there's been either a Bush or a Dole in government, either in the House, the Senate or the White House. Come 2009, this will no longer be the case. Libby Dole, wife of the former senator and 1996 presidential candidate Bob Dole, is now scheduled to lose her Senate seat in North Carolina.

The adverse conditions for the Republican Party this year were compounded in Mrs Dole’s case by the fact that she scarcely bothered to visit the state she purported to represent.

The Republicans have lost another Senate seat, that of John Sununu in New Hampsire. If this trend continues, the Democrats will break the 60-seat barrier, and have a veto/filibuster-proof majority.

It's a mixed blessing, since if they do break 60 in the Senate the Democrats won't have the Republicans to blame for obstructionism and sabotage of the Obama agenda. The excuses that got them through the last two years, since they narrowly won control of Congress in 2006, will no longer obtain.

In the House it looks as though the Democrats will have a very big majority, of roughly 261 to 174, once again of huge importance in marginalising the Republicans' capacity to fight rearguard battles or sidetrack legislation.

Nancy Pelosi will become the most powerful House leader in well over a generation. And it is the House, remember, which controls the purse strings, and it is Pelosi, not Obama, who sets the legislative agenda.

In short, Election 2008 is registering as big a sea change in American politics as did 1932 for the Democrats with FDR and 1964 with LBJ.

Pat Buchanan, who helped invent Conservative politics back in the age of Nixon, said mournfully tonight that the Conservative Revolution is over, and George Bush has been the grave-digger.

FIRST POSTED NOVEMBER 5, 2008