With John Edwards’s endorsement of Barack Obama this evening, it looks increasingly like the primary is wrapping itself up. It’ll undoubtedly straggle on for a bit longer, but the jig is really up for the Clinton campaign. Which meant tonight was the first time in a while that I’ve moved away from focusing my political imagination exclusively on the state of things right now and gotten back into the heady business of thinking about what things might be like come next January.

It’s pretty lucrative imaginative material—especially juxtaposed next to the sort of dull, blank acrimony of this primary. But just think what’s in the political cards. Chances are fairly good that the Democrats will gain at least a handful of Senate and House seats. With Travis Childers’s victory in the Mississippi congressional race, it even seems possible that we might have a blowout on our hands. It’s going to take a hell of a lot of work, but the trials of the past eight years have really sharpened the left. I think we’re ready to fight.

Which leads to the possibility of a genuinely transformative Democratic president presiding over a solidly Democratic Congress that may even include a filibuster-proof Senate. That’s insane to imagine, especially coming out of the right-wing stranglehold of the past years. It’s also something that hasn’t happened in a hell of a long time. The only real historical precedent is in 1964, when LBJ entered office with a huge Democratic House majority and a Senate supermajority. Even though that number included a large fraction of old-line Dixiecrats who weren’t particularly interested in left politics, 1964-1966 was still by all accounts the high-water mark of postwar liberalism.

So what could Obama, aided by a strong Democratic coalition and a message of change, possibly do? The possibilities are staggering. If it does come to pass, the administration will no doubt go down as one of the most transformative in American politics. Because, in the end, American politics really hasn’t seen any new ideas in the past twenty years. Clinton was an able president by all means, but hardly innovative. Bush, for all his disasters, has mostly just bumbled his way through a sea of incompetence—he hasn’t even succeeded in producing any lasting conservative visions. But under Obama, the years 2009–2017 might find themselves entered into the historical record as a definitive era in the liberal politics of the United States.