I don't have any idea how tomorrow's voting will turn out, but if I had to guess, I'd go with the pundits and say the Dems will wind up with a small majority in the House and the Reps will hang on to a small majority in the Senate. State and local races will probably show a small, but certainly not overwhelming Democratic victory. This is good news for me, and I hope it turns out that way, although I'm well aware the voters have a way of pulling surprises of their own.

I say good news because although I want to break the back of the Rep domination of everything, I don't want to see the Dems go on an orgy of revenge and recrimination which will only further polarize the country. I reject a left wing Reagan or Gingrich. Besides, even a misguided government is preferable to a deadlocked one. With control of the executive branch and one house of the legislature the Republicans will still have the opportunity to demonstrate the validity of their ideas, but they will not be able to blame any failure to do so on being hamstrung by the opposition. Well, they're doing that now, but only they believe it. A Democratic sweep would give them all the excuses they need.

The big issue, of course, is Iraq. There are other, more long term problems out there, perhaps even more important ones, but this is the one that will dominate the near future. Over the next two years in the scenario I've outlined above, the Bush administration will have the opportunity to either organize some gradual and orderly withdrawal from the country or to carry out their plan of installing a pro-American client state a la pre-1979 Iran in the heart of the mid east. He'll have time to either win or draw, and if he's smart he'll be able to avoid losing altogether. If he continues as he has been for the last few years without any success, he will only make it easier for his Democratic opponents, who will be perfectly justified in withdrawing precipitously and be completely entitled to wash their hands of the whole mess. Still, with a small majority in congress, the Bush White House will not be forced into one policy, they'll still a have a choice, and they'll still have time to recover.

What I've learned from this whole sad business is that our government works best when one party does not control the reigns of power completely. The stupidity, corruption and arrogance of the present administration could just have easily been a Democratic one; I can see now that regardless of ideology, power begets complacency and greed. We would be fools to think the shortcomings of the Bush Jr years was simply a conservative disease. The founding fathers new better. They understood this, they called it "factionalism", and they created a system ingeniously designed to frustrate it.

I didn't capitalize the term "founding fathers" because I loathe the idea of the deification of what were very human men, with agendas and shortcomings and contradictions. The were not gods, just flawed men, but they were not ordinary men, either. By luck or some obscure psychohistorical mechanism, they were unprecedented political geniuses, a product of the best political philosophers of the Enlightenment and the Age of Reason: the age of Newton and Bach and Jefferson.

I have a good feeling about tomorrow.