PUBLISHED 11/10/08 -----

The good news for Democrats is that they will soon control the White House and both houses of Congress.

That’s also the bad news for Democrats — and the hopeful news for conservative Republicans who fear that Democrats, unchecked, could give the U.S. a highly regulated, European-style government.

The U.S. has seen innumerable zigs and zags in economic and social policy over the years, but inevitably the nation returns to a less extreme position, whether it be a move to the left or the right. When newly elected leaders are invested with unusual clout, they invariably overreach and prompt a backlash.

The Obama administration will be wise to recognize this as it brings forth an ambitious agenda. All indications suggest that Democrats are fully aware of the repercussions of trying to do too much too soon.

Speaker Nancy Pelosi promises they won’t give in to party liberals. “The country must be governed from the middle,” she said last week. Congressmen like “blue dog” moderate Rep. Jim Costa, D-Fresno, will have to see to it that Pelosi means what she says.

Republicans like Rep. Kevin McCarthy of Bakersfield are undoubtedly counting on the possibility that those are just words, and that Democrats will overestimate their mandate.

Theirs is not empty optimism. In 1992, Bill Clinton got into trouble with his “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy on gays in the military, and in trying to create a federally managed health care system. Two years later, Republicans swept the House and Clinton spent the next six years accommodating them.

But the Republican revolution didn’t last, either. George W. Bush claimed a mandate in 2000, despite a narrow defeat in the popular vote, the controversy of Florida and Supreme Court intervention, and soon after winning a second term, found his administration similarly bogged down. It was his ineffectiveness and single-minded pursuit of an ultraconservative agenda that put the Democrats where they are now — back in power, almost as if 1994 never happened.

Barack Obama takes office at a time when the nation’s problems are many. We’re not just in the midst of economic meltdown, but in an environment where the gap between rich and poor has never been greater, where too many find health insurance beyond their reach, and U.S. schools continue to lag behind. Democrats will be eager to address those issues forcefully.

In one scenario, Republicans could actually help them. Some in the GOP grumble that the party was heading too far right when it should be angling toward the center in order to increase its national appeal. An analysis of the electoral map might support that: The GOP appears to have become the party of the South and the lower Midwest.

Just the same, Obama will be wise to match the centrist campaign he just conducted with an administration that, if not necessarily centrist, appreciates the need to appease the center. For all of Obama’s successes on Nov. 4, it’s still not clear that this has become a center-left nation.

The past eight years have created a political environment Republicans will be hard-pressed to escape. But Obama, abetted by an overspending, overregulating majority in Congress, could be just the ticket.