Q: Ron Brownstein is the political director for Atlantic Media, which includes, of course, the National Journal. We have a new president, Ron.

Brownstein: And we have a president with an emphatic result -- not quite a full-scale Electoral College landslide of the sort we've seen for Richard Nixon or Ronald Reagan or Lyndon Johnson, but a truly... the most decisive presidential victory probably since 1980 in the sense that it included not only [Barack] Obama's personal win -- the first Democrat since Jimmy Carter in 1976 to get past 50 percent of the vote, the first Democrat since Lyndon Johnson to get past 50.1 percent of the vote -- but it also brought in along with him expanded margins in the House and the Senate -- at least six seats in the Senate, around 20 or more in the House.

Tammy, the last president who came in, won a decisive Electoral College victory and brought in members of his own party in both the House and the Senate in substantial numbers was Ronald Reagan in 1980. So this was a broad, across-the-board victory whose demographic implications were as significant as its geographic implications.

Q: I'm just going to ask the question and I'm going to get over it: How much of this had to do with the fact that people were so unhappy with this presidency?

Brownstein: Overwhelmingly. I think the driving current in this race, or to switch the metaphor, the gravity in this election, was the widespread, overwhelming public discontent with President Bush and the country's direction. If you go back through American history, Tammy, there are very few examples of an outgoing president being this unpopular and his party winning the election to succeed him, whether it was Lyndon Johnson in 1968, Harry Truman in 1952, Woodrow Wilson in 1920, Grover Cleveland in 1896, James Buchanan in 1860 -- just almost always when a president faces this level of discontent, voters' instinct is to reach for the out-party, and we saw that very tangibly on Election Day. Seventy-one percent of voters in the election, in the exit poll, said they disapproved of President Bush's performance, and of those, two-thirds voted for Obama. That essentially sealed the election right there.

By the way, parenthetically, that impulse, that relationship was as powerful in the Senate races. If you look at the six states where Democrats have to date picked up Senate seats -- Oregon, Colorado, New Mexico, Virginia, North Carolina, New Hampshire -- about two-thirds or more of voters who disapproved of Bush in each of those states voted Democratic in that race. And so you see the very heavy price the party has paid.

And by the way, you can see it demographically as well -- the narrowing of the Republican base. If you think about it kind of in broad lanes of the electorate or tracks of the electorate, the only piece that remained strongly Republican at the end of the Bush era were these non-college, working-class white voters who tend to be culturally conservative and hawkish on foreign policy. Obama was held to 40 percent among them, really a very small improvement over John Kerry's 38 percent. But everywhere else: Hispanic voters, 2 to 1 for Obama; voters under 30, 2 to 1 for Obama; African-Americans, 95, 96 percent for Obama; and perhaps as significant as any of that, college-educated white voters all the way up to 47 percent -- one of the best performances by Democrats in recent times.

And what Bush has done, I think, in kind of a lasting way, is narrow the reach of the Republican Party both demographically and geographically through a governing strategy that focused much more on speaking to his base than trying to reach out to people beyond it. He leaves the party in retreat, I think, holding on to a very narrow core now of inland, heartland, culturally conservative states and this one slice of the electorate which is shrinking over time.

Q: So all this microtargeting by Karl Rove and company was all for naught.

Brownstein: Well, what they did -- I think, you know, Karl Rove was a brilliant tactician, I think, in the service of a fundamentally flawed strategy. Bush's goal always was deepen, not broaden. It was much more about squeezing out more advantage from the groups that already leaned in your direction than it was about finding ways to meet the needs and respond to the concerns of new constituencies and new interests. And even in 2004, when he won re-election, he only got to 50.8 percent of the vote. He lost independents. And in his second term you saw the cost of operating on such a narrow ledge. I mean, even on President Bush's best day about half the country opposed him and disliked kind of the direction that he set. You know what, if you stay on Pennsylvania Avenue long enough, 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, not every day is going to be your best day. And his disapproval rating, you know, soared to unprecedented heights, and I think [John] McCain paid a heavy price for that.

Now, not all of these trends -- many of the key trends that we're going to talk about here in a minute about the election, you know, far predate Bush -- the decline of the Republicans in the Northeast, the movement of these white-collar, socially moderate suburbs away from the Republicans that started in the '90s, but he accelerated many of these trends by, I think, drawing such a sharp line in the electorate.

And his kind of spiritual successor in this campaign was Sarah Palin, who practiced a very similar, perhaps even harder-edged kind of politics. When she talked about pro-America parts of the country, implying that others were not, she drew a pretty sharp line in the sand there. And you know what? What we saw in these results were, a lot of upper-middle-class suburban counties all across the country placed themselves on the other side of that line and delivered overwhelming, crushing margins to Barack Obama.

Q: Before we get deeply into the voters, let's talk about how cities across America -- not just Grant Park that night -- in Washington, New York, you name it, people were cheering at the tops of their lungs for the presidency. It always reminds me of the New York Times stories that have, you know, in all these different countries around the world where there's a new president or new, you know, whoever, and there are people cheering in the streets, and you think, jeez, they must be so happy, look, they're out in the street, but it's here in the United States. Has that ever happened before?

Brownstein: Well, I'm sure it has. But I think what you're seeing was -- I mean, this election, was it not the maximum effort that blue America could have put into electing a president? And that started -- I mean, that flame was ignited by the discontent and the antagonism for President Bush and the approval rating among Democrats in the single digits since 2004. It was then fanned by enthusiasm for Obama.

But when you look at this from every dimension -- 3 million donors, 2-plus million volunteers, $600 million raised, 100,000 volunteers in the SEIU union alone on the last weekend knocking on doors, Bruce Springsteen doing concerts, Jay-Z doing concerts -- you really felt like, you know, kind of the left, the center-left coalition in America gave this everything they had. I mean, they left nothing in the locker room. They left it all on the field, and the intensity that this inspired, really, for the last four years, culminated on Election Day. You kind of wonder, if Obama did not win after all of that effort it would have been an extraordinary moment for the Democratic Party and their allies in the sense of realizing that they do face a structural deficit.

In fact, Obama significantly expanded the map. He broke through many of what have seemed the calcified divides of the 50/50 nation that we've been living with since the mid-1990s, and he offered the potential of a new and expanding coalition that has broad reach, both demographically and geographically -- if he can hold it together, of course, by the way that he governs.

Q: How is he going to hold it together?

Brownstein: Well, let's talk about what it is first, and then...

Q: Okay.

Brownstein: ...and sort of understand what it is, and then talk about the challenge of holding it together. Obama built what I call in National Journal today a coalition of the ascendant. He built -- he attracted his majority, or constructed his majority, around elements of society that are predominantly growing in size -- Hispanics growing in population; young people, this vast millennial generation, growing in population; upper-middle-class white professionals, generally growing somewhat in population.

And what he has done is aligned the Democrats with what are growing elements of our society, at least for now, and left Republicans, as we said before, with this one redoubt, which are these blue-collar -- ironically the kind of working-class white families the Democrats want to be seen as the champions of and all that economic populism is aimed at, but which they moved only in relatively small numbers. I mean, Obama still got up only to 40 percent among non-college voters. There was a lot of hope that he could do a lot better among those waitress moms, those non-college working white women. He only got to 41 percent there. They resisted him. But, Tammy, they were only 39 percent of the vote.

Q: Wow.

Brownstein: Twenty years ago they were an absolute majority of the vote. In fact, white voters in this election fell under three-quarters of the vote, I'm sure for the first time in our history. They were only 74 percent. And those national numbers don't even reflect the reality in some of these battleground states. If you look at places like Colorado or New Mexico or Nevada or Arizona, the share of the vote cast by Hispanics jumped significantly. It is not at all, by the way, difficult to imagine that a President Obama running for re-election in 2012 against someone not from the state of Arizona could win that.

And so, what they were able to do was create a coalition of the ascendant demographically, and then geographically they pushed out -- they challenged what had been this Republican heartland fortress in the '90s and then the two Bush elections -- they pushed against the borders of that, both in the South, where they took the outer South states of Virginia and North Carolina and from the other end, Florida, and also in the West, where they flipped Colorado, which has voted Democratic only once since 1964, flipped New Mexico, which went narrowly for Bush last time, and flipped Nevada.

And what particularly -- last point quickly -- on what you saw in Virginia, North Carolina, Colorado and New Mexico and Nevada -- out of all of them you saw the same phenomenon in this election that we lived through in the 1990s under Bill Clinton. In the 1990s under Bill Clinton the biggest thing that changed in American politics was that white-collar suburbs in the Northeast and the West Coast and the Upper Midwest, places like Montgomery County, Pennsylvania, and Delaware County, Pennsylvania, and Santa Clara County, California, and Bergen, New Jersey, they flipped from Republican to Democrat -- these socially moderate upper middle income white voters.

What we saw in this election was a) Obama consolidated those advantages and expanded them -- Oakland County, Michigan, outside Detroit, 95,000 vote advantage; 200,000 vote lead for Obama in the suburbs of Philadelphia. But even more importantly, he expanded that phenomenon into new terrain. We saw the affluent suburbs of Raleigh and Charlotte and outside the D.C. metro area and the suburbs of Denver behaving in this election in the same way their demographic cousins did in the 1990s, and that is a lasting change. If Obama can hold -- can sustain and consolidate that, that is a lasting change in the balance of power between the parties.

Q: That is incredible. All right. Let's turn to today. What do they have to do to keep this coalition together? How do you govern with this kind of pressure? Got the market crashing, 240,000 jobs announced were lost today, 6.5 percent unemployment.

Brownstein: We are heading into a very difficult time economically, and you know, in some ways Obama inherits a similar but more difficult situation than Bill Clinton did when he came in, because the economy was actually beginning to come out of the recession by the time Clinton arrived and this one seems to be deepening. It is going to, I think, create challenges for him in all directions. On the one hand, you need a short-term recovery plan. On the other, you are going to be facing enormous deficits as the economy slows down and that will raise the question, which I think was already there on the table, of whether even a Democratic majority will be willing to go ahead with some of the spending that he has proposed on energy, and health care in particular, at the level of deficit that we are anticipating.

So, hard choices. One thing is clear, though, Tammy. They do not want to make the same judgment and same trade-off that Bill Clinton did when he came in. Bill Clinton came in, like Obama confronting a huge deficit left to him by a Republican named Bush, and Clinton made the fundamental strategic decision to lower his sights on his new spending programs and to focus primarily on deficit reduction.

Obama has made very clear that they are not going to do that, and they are not going to go through that again; they're going to simply raise taxes to reduce the deficit. He wants to put some new initiatives out there on the table which he believes will help grow the economy, but when you are talking about deficits of this magnitude... Are those Democrats -- we talked about his gains in places like the Mountain West and the outer South -- are the Democratic House and Senate members from those kind of swing places going to be able to abide an agenda that envisions significant increases in spending without any focus on a deficit that will I'm sure be in dollar terms an all-time record? I don't know. I mean, all of these things are difficult.

The one thing he's got going for him is that Democrats lived through the chaos of '93-94. They knew the cost of that, when they had unified control last, was a devastating election that gave Republicans control, and I think they are going to try to work together more effectively than they did in the first two years under Clinton.

Q: Thank you, Ron Brownstein.

Brownstein: Thank you.