So yesterday’s cloture vote against the Alito confirmation didn’t work out that well. Scanning the comment threads of some of the really big left-of-center blogs last night, I didn’t have to go too far to discover there are some really, really angry folks out there. But here’s the deal, now that this particular deal has gone down:You can focus on the 19 Democrats who voted for cloture, or focus on the 40-odd Democrats who are going to vote against the actual confirmation today. You can read the whole Alito story as one of Democratic disunity, weakness and perfidy, or you can read it as a high-water mark of unity in the face of a confirmation that was never seriously in danger, in a U.S. Senate with a Republican ten-vote margin. You can look around for villains, blaming the failure of a too-little, too-late filibuster effort on some sort of DLC plot (yeah, our influence with senators like Inouye and Rockefeller and Dorgan and Conrad is well-known, and it’s a good thing we have no links to Bayh or Clinton). Or you can just accept that it just wasn’t going to happen no matter what anybody did, especially at the last moment, and note the remarkable unity of Democratic organizations (including the DLC) in opposing Alito. You can, if you wish, channel your disappointment and anger into an effort to purge Democratic senators in primaries, or you can realize our biggest problem is the limited quantity of Democratic senators, not their “purity” or willingness to make every fight in the Senate the fight of their lives. You can consider the glass half-full, or more than half-full, or you can pour it all out.And in making each of these choices, remember there are plenty of folks out there with the motive and the means to trumpet the colture vote into a disaster for the Democratic Party. It’s a free country, and a free party, so do whatever your conscience dictates, but do it pretty soon, because there are many other political fish to fry, and as a party, we have to (with apologies to the organization by that name) move on.