This election was telegraphed just months after President Obama took office. People were desperate for transformational change, but on the economy they got just a nuanced version of the same basic approach we've seen since the Reagan era, the same basic approach that the Bush meltdown should have ended. That was a historic opportunity for paradigmatic change, and we had a uniquely talented thinker and teacher in the White House to lead that paradigmatic change. Instead, we got bank bailouts, tax cuts, and an inadequate stimulus that the very same few economists who had predicted the economic meltdown warned was an inadequate stimulus. Calls for a second stimulus were ignored. Every small blip of economic improvement was sold as significant, and Wall Street firms made record profits and paid staggering bonuses, but unemployment and under-employment and foreclosures continued to devastate people's lives. The moment passed. The opportunity passed. Political extremism gained a foothold, Democrats lost their footing, and a Republican Party that had been left for dead not even two years earlier, and that still isn't even widely liked, came roaring back to power.