What happened yesterday -- really, what's happened since Election Day 2006 -- is nothing short of astonishing. On his way to the presidency, Barack Obama won two of the most strongly Republican states in Indiana and Virginia. He won the greatest popular vote percentage for a Democrat since Lyndon Johnson. Establishment stalwart Elizabeth Dole found herself removed from the Senate when her culture war tactics failed in North Carolina of all places.

But for all of the incredible stuff that happened yesterday, we also saw what appears to be the first major failure of the Obama era. His electoral vote win wasn't called until the west coast polls closed at 11:00 EST, but his early wins in Pennsylvania and Ohio made it clear where things were going -- indeed, his huge lead in the polls in the last few days made it clear. And unfortunately, it looks like turnout wasn't what it should have been and that down-ticket races were never enough of a priority for the presidential campaign. Democratic gains in the House are going to be lower than they could have been, while Senate races in Minnesota and Alaska have worked out far below where they should have been. Proposition 8 in California, rescinding the right of gay couples to marry, is going to pass (ironically, exit polls suggest this is the result of strong black turnout). Watching the down-ticket returns come in (or not come in, as is still the case in Oregon, who could've counted most of their mail-only votes before Election Day, WTF?!?) I felt sick, because this was one of my major concerns about Obama throughout the campaign -- not that he would be a drag, but that he wasn't interested in building a party movement rather than an Obama movement.

We've done this before. When Bill Clinton was elected we forgot about party cohesion (to be fair, there were a lot more Dixiecrats in the party at that time) and the rest is history. I desperately hope we don't forget the lessons of those first two Clinton years. The biggest one is that the GOP isn't going away. They are going to "filibuster" everything without having to actually get up and do it. They are going to be at Obama's heels from day one, if not before. It's been tempting for a lot on the left to read the accusations of Marxism as secretly being about race, and I have to think that's what the attackers want. In fact, this is how they go after Democrats, and they will continue to do so. Yesterday wasn't just about electing Obama, and tomorrow isn't just about Obama being the president; it's about Obama governing.