The wave has hit, the tsunami crested, and Democrats are beginning to pick through the rubble wondering which pieces to salvage first. For the Democratic Party, the 2010 election was a disaster, but not quite the catastrophe it could have been had the Senate been taken over by Republicans.

Here in Marin County, U.S. Lynn Woolsey was re-elected, winning 65.2 percent of the vote, a handsome and not unexpected plurality. Ironically, San Francisco's Nancy Pelosi did even better, re-elected with an astounding 80.4 percent of the vote. Despite winning eight out of every 10 votes in San Francisco, the loss of the House majority and Pelosi's exit from the Speakership were bitter institutional and personal losses. They are likely un-salved by the fact that the right wing spent literally billions to target Pelosi as the personification of liberal evil-doing. It is not clear at this point, whether she has the stomach for a fight over who, as House Minority Leader, will begin to shore up the Democratic Party in Congress. Will she pull a Newt Gingrich and resign from both the leadership and the House? Or, will she refashion herself as a new Sam Rayburn, the Speaker from Bonham, TX, who ran the House from the 1930s through the 1960s, retaking the Speakership three times. One hopes the latter.

There are those who view the election as a historic turning point in which Tea Party conservatism has triumphed over New Deal liberalism. This may indeed be the case. If so, however, you also need to account for the billions in secret funds spent in the wake of last winter's Citizen's United Supreme Court decision and the sorry state of the national economy, which complicates the answer and perhaps defers it to a future election.

One truth that is undeniable is that despite the loss of the House majority, California, the Bay Area and Marin County specifically remain bastions of the progressivism that reamains the predominating theme in modern state politics. Marin County has the honor  along with San Francisco of voting 62 percent to 38 percent in favor of Proposition 19, which would have legalized marijuana, the highest pro-pot percentage of any county in the  state. Similarly, in spite of the electoral carnage elsewhere, the Bay Area did not lose a single House seat to Republicans and helped solidify an electorate that only booted out  seven House members' seats in the entire West, a sign that California is now the political firebreak against the Tea Party and extremist Republicanism.

Damage was done. With Republicans running the House, the Bay Area's Congressional delegation will no longer be the juggernaut it has been with the clout to bring home the public works "pork" that was a hallmark of the Pelosi era. If Republicans are to be believed, however, "bringing home the bacon," will be an increasingly uncomfortable notion in an era of Rand Paul balanced budgets. Ironically, it may be that Northern California's technology megalith is the engine that pulls America out of the economic ditch. Although the economy was the issue that dragged Democrats down in the first place, early signs seem to indicate that a recovery is in the works, focused on Bay Area technology.

Another factoid worth noting is that in 2010, Democrats suffered their worst defeat in the House of Representatives since 1938, a year in which Democrats lost 77 House seats and which holds some important portends for us today. It was the election in which Republicans convinced America that the "Alphabet Soup" of New Deal programs critical in the national recovery should be discarded in favor of a balanced budget. With this once and current canard, Republicans gained control of the House and Franklin Roosevelt's keen political radar led him to cut back the New Deal. The result was a misunderstanding of the fragile nature of the 1930s recovery and the start of a nasty "Double-Dip Recession" that rivaled the Great Depression in its severity and ended only with the outbreak of war in 1941.

Today, as then, penny-wise, pound-foolish Republicans have been able to ride the balanced budget beast into control of the House. And today, as then, the Republicans will ultimately be unmasked for their "greed too far," having bought their way back into Congressional power two- to four-years sooner than politically sustainable or economically wise. Do not, therefore, be surprised if exactly two years from today, a poorer, wiser and still-grumpier American electorate will have just voted out clueless balanced-budgeting Republican and Tea Party legislators deemed responsible for the coming "Double Dip Repression." Sadly, it seems that a "Double Dip," will be the only way to prove once and for all, the efficacy and necessity for the Keynesian solutions that President Obama, like President Roosevelt, were prevented from fully implementing.

The final undeniable truth of the 2010 election is more social than it is political. It tells us that the election of Jerry Brown and re-election of Marin's own Barbara Boxer are national bright spots in what was otherwise a dismal result. For a century-and-a-half, California has been the spearhead of American civilization, as true today as it was in the eighteen-fifties. Jerry Brown, in particular, is just such a California force of nature, a brilliant politician who sometimes leads with his mouth but, if you stick with him, always has important things to say. Governor-elect Brown has the will, the intelligence and the energy to lead a state characterized by the common sense to have rejected billionaire political wannabes, who could have run first against one another for Woodside City Council and thereby saved hundreds of millions of dollars spent on campaigns that were historic only in their waste, arrogance and futility.