And now at last we get back to normal. Now we can all reunite and hold hands and buy the world a Coke, right?

No. When Walter Mondale took a pasting, half the nation didn't convert to Ronald Reagan's stare-down-the-Rooskies approach. Bill Clinton's victory in '96 didn't make conservatives think, "Gosh, he's popular. Let's give him that nationalized health care, eh? It would mean so much to him."

Normal is normal only in retrospect, when you've forgotten the love-him/loathe-him dynamic that has ruled the political culture since Richard Nixon. (With a brief time out for the halcyon, let-grandpa-drive mood of Bush 41's first two years.) We're back to deep polarization, which isn't new in our history, but seems so different from the gauzy era of I Like Ike and the beloved reign of FDR.