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SNIP

>She was extremely polarizing. IMO she has an old style liberal vision of big government which has fallen out of fashion and is especially out of fashion in these economic times. There was also a lot of talk about her high handedness and freezing out the opposing party. That's just not smart. I guess she felt she had a large enough majority to get away with it. As we saw on Tuesday, large majorities are not guaranteed to last. In fact they generally do not.
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>Exit polls on Tuesday showed voters nearly as upset with the Republican Party as they are with the Democrats. It's also true that they hold only a slim margin in the House and still operate alongside a Democratic majority in the Senate and a Democratic President. If they are wise they will let the giddiness over the election results go and not take it as a mandate.
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>Just as an average citizen (part of "the American people" politicians like to speak for and explain to us) my biggest fear is both parties will continue focusing on each other rather than the serious problems we face. There are things that need to be addressed and it is possible to compromise without selling your soul. It doesn't have to be a jihad. It's certainly not getting us anywhere.

The post election comments by Boehner and Rubio were pretty clear that the Republican party was on notice (and so are the left-over Dems by the looks of post election polls) and this is only a probationary period for them. Now if everyone in office looked at it that way it might actually be a productive session for a change (think back to Clinton's term where the two parties actually worked together and even Clinton went along to balance the budget when he initially said it was a bad idea for the economy).