Our president's analysis of why he received a shellacking at the midterms put the blame squarely on us: He may have failed to communicate how wonderful his programs were, but we were too thick-witted to understand that he was leading us to nirvana. Now the Congressional Democrats are offering their own analyses:

Pelosi will lead Democrats "in pulling on the president's shirttails to make sure that he doesn't move from center-right to far-right," said Rep. Lynn Woolsey, D-Calif., a co-chair of the liberal Progressive Caucus in the House. "We think if he'd done less compromising in the last two years, there's a good chance we'd have had a jobs bill that would have created real jobs, and then we wouldn't even be worrying about having lost elections."

Rep. Brian Higgins, D-N.Y., said Democrats learned from the last two years and their shellacking at the polls that "we need to be more aggressive with the White House. They were looking for what was acceptable and then moving toward that, instead of what was important, and moving toward that," Higgins said. "We need to be true to our principles."