Whatever happens on Tuesday, we'll need to start fighting again Wednesday

(and, let me make this clear, NOT with each other).

We'll need to fight to regain what may have been lost(even if the losses, as now appears, aren't as bad as they might have been)

We'll need to fight all the voices in the party who will blame a bad result on the activists and try to shut all of us out even more. We need to work to regain support for the party, but we will never regain it by blurring the differences between our side and the other side. There is NOTHING on the other side that any decent Democrat, or any decent human being, should have any good reason to agree with.

We'll need to fight to renew the party and its ideals, so that there is something to fight FOR and not just AGAINST in 2012. If we let our campaign that year be reduced to "the other side is EVIL", we all KNOW we'll lose.

And we'll need to fight, most of all, for the new America that we thought was born on Election Night 2008 and may end up in the political post-natal care unit. Whatever we think of the administration, everyone who will be left out in the cold if the Tea Party should win the White House is depending on us to wage THAT fight, and we can only win that fight by making this a party with things to fight FOR, rather than simply a rump group that forever fights AGAINST what the other party does, and against the other party's hateful campaign to drag us back to the America of the 1920's. Or maybe the 1620's, depending on what mood they're in.

Nothing will end on Tuesday night. And the next round begins Wednesday morning.