Last Man Standing

Esquire's Tim Hefferman on the political wars in 2010 and beyond:

"My fellow Editors are right that we as a country get what we vote for. But it's worth noting that among what we voted for are a center-left president, a moderate Republican from Sarah Palin's home state, and a host of both purists and pragmatists, of conservative Democrats and libertarian Republicans, of people who at one moment seems hidebound in their partisanship and at the next surprise us with their independence. ... there are many in Congress who do not fit and do not follow the Manichean model of two-party politics. I expect to hear more from and about them in the next two years. I expect that much will get done because of them. And I expect that this two-line assessment of 2010 will be vindicated:

The Republicans won the battle. And the president won the war."

Damn right. And no one more than Obama knows that at the end of the day, "war," as Bertrand Russell put it, "does not determine who is right - only who is left."