Different standards for elections and governing

The news this morning is that Democrats won 2 of the 6 recall elections in Wisconsin yesterday. There is a lot of back-and-forth about whether this is a win or loss for Democrats given that they needed 3 wins to take back the WI Senate.

What's interesting to me is that Markos calls it a real victory.

I've got to say, I expected to be torn up if we didn't get to three seats. I expected to suffer through yet another bout of electoral depression, bummed at coming up short yet again. And we did come up short!

Short of what? Short of taking the Wisconsin Senate? Sure. That would've been nice.

But let me just say, if tonight was a loss, I hope we have many more such "losses" in 2012...

So yeah, I feel strangely energized and elated.

It's going to be a long year, and tens of millions of dollars of Koch money (in addition to hundreds of millions more from Rove and allies) are going to force us to fight like hell for every inch of territory. They won't cede it willingly or fairly. They'll do their best to cheat or buy whenever they feel they can't win fairly.

That's our challenge. I, for one, am ready for it.

I tend to agree.

But what I find interesting is that - when it comes to elections - Markos is fine with celebrating incremental change. But when President Obama and Democrats in Congress face those same kinds of challenges from Republicans in governing, incremental change is considered "weak." It sounds an awful lot to me like giving ourselves - as voters - a break that we're not willing to extend to politicians.