“Like George Miller, Barney Frank and the other liberals produced by Vietnam and Watergate, Mr. Waxman belongs to a cohort whose power has been checked — one way or the other — by Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton's New Democrat tendencies, the Republican sweep of 1994 and George W. Bush. Now with a new Democratic President and a crisis to use as a lever for a sweeping expansion of government, they aren't about to let an old warhorse with scruples about the costs of regulation interfere with their moment to govern.

… Meanwhile, in another sign of the Waxman ascendancy, President-elect Obama has named Philip Schiliro, a Waxman loyalist and his former chief of staff, as the new White House director of Congressional relations. Robert Sussman, who leads the transition's Environmental Protection Agency “review team,” has been an astringent critic of Mr. Dingell on carbon regulation. And Carol Browner, Al Gore's protégé turned Clinton EPA administrator turned director of Mr. Obama's “energy working group,” is another old Dingell foe.”

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122722722366746...

In other words, we don't gush stupidly over Obama, but see the more broad, serious issue here, namely liberalism's fully open route (rather than constrained and often concealed) in Washiongton.

“With the election of Barack Obama and huge Democratic majorities in Congress, liberals must now practice something other than the politics of nostalgia and what-if.

This is a politics that has been in the making since at least 1968 …

Now the long wait is over, and the liberal ship has come in. In Mr. Obama, liberals have a president who seems to have stepped out of the last episodes of the West Wing. He has the Congress in his left pocket, the news media in his right pocket (or is it the other way around?), and he floats on a tide of unprecedented international enthusiasm.

… Succeed or fail, this time there can be no excuses.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122697207170735...