Biggest upset last night was professional right-wing activist Christine O'Donnell beating career pol and relative moderate Mike Castle. This is a mystery to many people: She's a very, very flawed candidate.
I'd like to suggest that Democrats should not count their chickens about this or any other seat.
Try to watch without judging substance here:
O'Donnell has her facts wrong; she may be flaky, and even dishonest. But she's an effective speaker: She seems to mean what she says; she's urgent; she talks about kitchen-table issues; and that she's an attractive female doesn't hurt. (Sound like anyone?)
I don't want to overstate the magnitude here: O'Donnell won with 30,000-some votes. Tea Party activists raised a $216,000 for her -- nice, but not a gigantic money-bomb.
But I'm interested in learning the reason for Tea Party/Glenn Beck-style energy -- again, without the interference of judging the substance. (Yes, I agree, it's hideous.) What they're creating, using, and directing here is a sense of community, of holding together. That they've identified an enemy in the personage of Obama is part and parcel of that -- an enemy can help define a commonality.
I want to riff off of something that O'Donnell alludes to: The paleo-conservative idea that government supplants relationships and prerogatives that are properly left to the individual or community. This is true of politics, too; and it's something we're now enduring as left-Democrats.
When your party controls the branches of government, the process and institutional prerogatives (i.e. the inner workings of the Senate; the House; the Presidency; institutional Washington) supplant the communal energies of the grassroots, which is now what wins primary elections.
This disaffection crippled the Republicans in 2006 and 2008: The grassroots-right didn't really identify with the Bush administration (Medicare Part D; immigration; Harriet Miers). The largely-successful fights over health care and financial re-regulation have splintered and enervated the grassroots left, rather than energizing them.
The rhetoric of opposition can afford to be lofty, or gritty, or heroic. We can compare ourselves to historic battle heroes. Everything lives in a shining future, in a world of emotion, of values.
Successes in governance are quickly forgotten by the world of politics -- or perhaps not forgotten but absorbed. The question always comes around to, What else have you got?
In an election year of such dislocation and uncertainty, there is no such thing as a candidate that's "too extreme". When there is such widespread distrust of leadership, even radical ideas are evaluated anew.
But a successful rebuff to the Tea Party right will address emotions, values, relations, and high aspirations for the future. It will do more than merely acknowledge disappointment -- it will actively channel it for greater change.