"I just hope Nancy Pelosi doesn't fuck all this up," my wife told me the other day. I said that she'd make mistakes. "She's already made too many" came the reply.

In a nutshell, this is why bread-and-butter Democrats have a hard time holding on to power. They want to do the right thing and not the practical thing. In fact, many believe that doing the right thing even when they know it won't work is, well, the right thing to do. Not that I'm calling my wife a Democrat--she's a registered independent. In fact, she tends to like Republicans better than Democrats--personally, if not necessarily their politics. But the fact remains that Howard Dean's "Democratic wing of the Democratic Party" likes to mire itself down in discussion and personal (as opposed to adversarial) recrimination and not worry so much about how things are going overall.

Never mind that this is the sort of behavior that got the Republicans kicked out a couple months ago. The core leaders of the 1990s Republican "revolution" weren't, by and large, a bunch of hard-core policy conservatives. They were neo-cons or "compassionate conservatives" or social conservatives who wanted to use the power of government to remake America in their own image. That sort of utopian mindset is bound to get a politician in trouble. Because when you forget that your job is running the country--rather than passing laws for the supposed benefit of a brain-dead lady in Florida--the voters tend to get a bit pissed off.

Already, some Democrats are complaining that the new leadership wants to control spending. There is even talk of (gasp!) banishing earmarks. All well and good (as far as I'm concerned), but in truth the Democrats are going to have one hell of a time fixing what's broken, much less actually coming up with a few new plans of their own. The next two years are going to be ugly, ugly, ugly.

Nonetheless, here's my wish list. A little late for Christmas, maybe, but Congress never gets anything done on time, anyway.

1. Single-payer health care. You can call it socialized medicine or whatever you like. Names aren't important; results are. If you pay sales taxes or property taxes, most likely you are already paying for health care for the neediest in your community. These folks only see doctors when they hit the emergency room at "county general," and you're the one who pays for it. Most people would pay much less in a "health care" tax than they do for their health plans now. And if you've got the scratch to pay for a better plan, I'm sure that can be arranged as well.

2. Immigration reform. We've got to figure out a way to make immigration fair and safe. And hey, if you really want to fix Social Security, why not make all "illegals" legal and make sure they're paid above the table. That would increase the FICA coffers immensely.

3. Education reform. To put it bluntly, we're too focused on testing. Some elementary school kids spend their entire year getting ready for the year-end test. What they learn is how to hate school, rather than stuff that might be important. America has thrived because it (somehow) seems to engender creative thought within its classrooms. Let's not kill that, okay?

4. End the war. Declare defeat and come home. If the Iranians and Syrians want to run Iraq, let them. I know this is a horribly irresponsible position, and I don't entirely believe in it myself, but still. It's no worse than what's going on right now.

I'm sure I can think of a thousand other things, but not right now. Christmas is over, this goose is fat and I've got to get back to listening to my neighbors complain about how the new Democratic Congress has broken their hearts.

Jon Worley hasn't written a real Christmas list in at least a year.