Obama helps destroy the Democrats David Brooks on the scale of the Republican victory: (T) hey obviously won the Senate ... they have kept the House. But just in the states, I didn't expect the governorships in all these Midwestern states ... Illinois ... Maryland... They control two-thirds of the governorships.. They control unprecedented levels of state legislators. They have now got a farm team across the country of rising politicians... And so they have become, with two-thirds control of all these states, these governorships and now majority control in both houses of Congress ... the dominant governing party in the country... (W) hat they do with it remain to be seen, but a lot of people have said, oh, the Republican [Party] is so extreme, it's a dinosaur, and I have even said some of that, over-relying on some of the demographics. But they are the dominant party in this country right now. And how can you be out of the mainstream if you dominate that much?... The core problem for the Democrats is that ... they're intellectually exhausted... (P) olitically, they obviously made a mistake by thinking demographics could carry them along the way and they didn't actually need issues. And that was a consultants" fantasy. And that hurt the Democrats. Mark Shields: (T) here were 256 Democrats in the House of Representatives the day that Barack Obama took oath of office in 2009. There will be about 185 six years in ... (T) he Senate goes from 60 Democrats to 45 ... (T) hose are numbers that are just of hemorrhage, dimensions and proportions. And it's a real rejection of Democrats... (F) or Democrats, it's a terrible, terrible, crushing defeat, and one that leaves them, I hope, engaged in serious introspection, because they went through a campaign where they had no economic message.