Well, liberals and progressives have just won themselves a major election. Eight years worth of pent-up azure-colored progressivism spewed forth from a long-simmering volcano. There's a mandate in here, somewhere. Now, conservatives may be right in the ultimate sense that Americans did not intend to let progressives define the extent of the change they voted in, and they are burnt when observers link the conservative movement of the late 1970s (which Reagan ran with) to the liberal movement of the Howard Dean-Barack Obama era (which Barack Obama kept some distance from). History will probably sustain the comparison in one sense: conservatives claimed a mandate after 1980, even if one did not exist in the phenominological sense, and liberals have as much right to claim a mandate today as conservatives did then.
Barack Obama, a man of the left with an empiricist, pragmatic, and politically hard-hearted temperament, is poised to deliber major progressive legislation: a transformative energy economy; universal health care; labor law reform; expanded federal rights for gays; transportation and infastructure spending; expansive regulation.
The few grumbles and grumblers will probably be shunted to the side, and anger may be channeled elsewhere. The Democratic Party is as united, now, as united since it's been since the government shutdown in the mid 1990s, and certainly as united as it ever will be.
Obama has proven adept at bringing new voices into his coalition without alienating existing supporters.
Obama's priorities in this fight over Joe Lieberman fight are in line with his priorities during the campaign: don't bother with petty fights that waste precious time and resources. Gather as much support as possible for the big prize.
He operates as a coalition-builder, and the political culture simply not used to that type of president, since we haven't had one for at least the past twenty years.
So: we shall try to look for fault lines that this volcanic eruption exposed. We can -- and will -- find contrarian voices to fill the storyline that we're absolutely certain must exist because it has existed for so long.
Or: we can adjust to new realities. One of them is that Obama found new ways to ascend to the summit, ways that don't involve rewarding pressure groups, ways that didn't even involve the netroots elites (although it certainly borrowed/stole/used the technological gridwork that they spent years building.)
Many on the left spent most of of 2008 questioning Obama's campaign, strategy, tactics, debate performances, obama's responses to this or that event.
Those voices have quieted; Obama won by seven points and two hundred electoral votes. He's going to get the benefit of the doubt.
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