How signficiant is taking two houses?

Interesting article here from Charles Krauthammer in the Seattle Times, equating the recent election to a football game, and showing how small the shift actually was. He also points out how both parties have shifted to the right.

The fact that this has happened shows what a strange and dangerous political place the center can be in terms of job security. The Dems in this election were very smart in their recruiting for battleground states, selecting more socially conservative politicians for states those states they were targetting to pick up. This of course allowed many of those social issues to be taken off the agenda, and allow the voters to think of other issues. Meanwhile, the more socially liberal GOP candidates typically lost their jobs, in some cases pretty much purely because they had an (R) after their name - Lincoln Chaffey being the most obvious example, who lost despite v. high popularity in his own state.

So the Dems target a move to the right to meet the electorate, the electorate moves to the left somewhat to meet them, and the GOP, almost by accident shifts further to the right by losing some candidates at the center. I've seen this happen in the UK as well. For many years after Tony Blair first won election, the Conservative party was effectively voted into irrelevancy by the public, with most of the more moderate elements of the party voted out of office, leaving a ragtag bunch of ultra-conservatives left to fight over their own ideology.

The bottom line here is if you are going to fight in the center, you better win in the center, but you ignore the center at your peril, because you may risk losing it for a generation.