PM Carpenter: Memo to Dems: "It Takes a Nixon"

Angry, restless Democrats and independents discredited my electoral pessimism last night in humiliating the retrograde party of medieval values, so why do I feel like Dick Nixon immediately after crushing the opposition in 1972, the man who, as described by one of his Cabinet members at the time, had a "joyless, brooding quality" about him?

Journalist-historian Theodore H. White attributed the victor's untimely depression to his profound dismay that "the American government ... had, without a doubt, grown too cumbersome to cope with the tangles of the post-war world at home and abroad." Nixon may have been on top, but he mostly felt cornered -- restrained by institutional custom, frustrated by bureaucratic blockades, cobbled by Congressional fiefdoms.