We've all heard the one about how the country can only have "one president at a time." But right now, would you say our problem is having too much leadership at the top or too little?

In the three weeks since Election Day, President-elect Barack Obama has taken pains not to seem overeager to take office. Making few public appearances, he has declined to attend the meeting of the G-20 countries and has demurred when asked to make pronouncements beyond the naming of his Cabinet and other top advisers.

President Bush, for his part, has receded so far from the prominent place he once filled in the national life that at times he seems to have left office entirely. He turns up in Lima, Peru, at an international conference. Back at the office, he hosts the usual mix of foreign dignitaries and trophy ceremonies. He occasionally tells the reporter pool the economic situation is "tough" but assures them the nation "will recover."

What can he do? The system requires him to hold office for 11 weeks after being repudiated and replaced. The interim is intended to give the successor time to repopulate the top echelons of power and choose a private school for the kids. But it is excruciating for the holdover officeholder, and it has to be one of the cruelest ways we Americans reveal our secret contempt for our pols.

Meanwhile, Bush appointees such as Henry Paulson at Treasury and Ben Bernanke at the Federal Reserve continue to run the government as it affects the economy. They are making big decisions, committing hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars. But if they are taking any orders from the chief executive, or following any plan devised within the White House, it has not been apparent to anyone — public sector or private.

Instead, Paulson, Bernanke & Co. have searched frantically for the right mix of mercy and discipline to restore order in the credit, commodity and equity markets. Seen as saviors by many in the early fall, they seemed decidedly mortal this month as the chaos seemed to expand all around them.

Right around mid-November, the need became acute for presidential leadership -- the indispensable constant in the American system since George Washington. And in that post-election moment, Mr. Bush, the lame-duck incumbent, was uniquely disqualified to provide what was needed.

No surprise, then, that a rattled and disbelieving nation has increasingly turned to a new savior in the person of the president-elect. Until recently a stranger to most Americans, the New Man has been brought on stage to perform miracles. And the audience is getting impatient for him to begin.

How anxious are people for new hope? When it became clear last week that the new secretary of the Treasury would be Timothy Geithner, the talented president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, the Dow recovered several hundred points in less than an hour. At the start of the new week, the "Geithner bounce" continued to buoy a market that has been almost entirely bereft of upbeat news since summer.

It has been some time since so much portent was attached to every move of an incoming president. Even the "Reagan Revolution" 28 years ago brought its sea change more gradually, amid great anticipation but no comparable sense of crisis. The Americans held hostage in Tehran would be released on Inauguration Day, as it turned out, but the new president and his team were not involved in the negotiations.

You have to go back 76 years, to the winter of 1932-33, to find a comparable conjunction of economic turmoil and political power shift. Franklin D. Roosevelt was elected in November but did not take the oath until March (thanks to the old inauguration schedule, set when new presidents came to town by horse and buggy).

In that four-month interregnum, President Herbert Hoover struggled with mounting bank failures (and a restive Democratic Congress pining to see its own man installed in the White House). Between the Wall Street crash of 1929 and inauguration 1933, one-fifth of all American banks failed. The rate was worsening when FDR took the oath and promptly declared a four-day bank "holiday" to forestall further failures. It was the beginning of the reign of improvisation.

And, lest we forget, when Abraham Lincoln was elected in November 1860, the South considered it a gauntlet on the ground. South Carolina seceded the following month, and six more states did the same before Inauguration Day. Now that is a crisis.

The current president-elect does not confront the dissolution of the Union or the immediate collapse of the banking system. He does, however, face the greatest strain on economic faith in at least a generation. So it is good that he comes to power on a wave of popular and electoral success. Early polls show that the country approves of Mr. Obama's election and transition to power. In fact, the proportion that approves of him so far is slightly larger than the proportion that actually voted for him.

This is a good thing. Perhaps the country cannot have more than one president at a time, but neither can it afford to have confidence in fewer than one.

What will it take for Republicans to recover from their 2008 electoral disaster? It's a big question, but the answer is really pretty simple. The cure for electoral disaster is usually found in real disaster.

Defeated parties sometimes make changes that make them more politically attractive next time around. But what ultimately brings them back is a dose of really bad news for the country, which usually translates into good news for the opposition (whichever party that happens to be).

This month's election sent Republicans sifting through the ruins of a power structure that just two years ago encompassed all of official Washington. In search of an explanation and a sense of how to rebuild, they seem to be reaching a conclusion well beyond the flaws in John McCain's campaign or the heavy burdens of a faltering economy and a failed presidency.

The consensus among conservatives is that the GOP deserved a drubbing — not for losing touch with the electorate, but for drifting too far from the movement's own ideological moorings. The prescription is not to widen the outreach but to bind the party more securely to its orthodoxy and find better messengers to carry the message.

Those preaching this form of redemption take inspiration from an earlier debacle and subsequent rebirth. In 1964, the GOP nominated Barry "Conscience of a Conservative" Goldwater, who got just 38.5 percent of the vote against Democrat Lyndon B. Johnson. It was among the most resounding landslides in our history, and obituaries for the losing party were ubiquitous.

Yet it only took two years for Republicans to bounce back in the 1966 midterm elections, when they took away a stunning 47 seats in the House and three in the Senate. Two years later, the Democratic nominee got less than 43 percent of the presidential vote, Four years later, the Democrat would get just 37.5 percent, 1 point under Goldwater.

For the past 40 years, it has been GOP dogma that the Goldwater loss was not only worthwhile but essential: It established the party as the home of conservatism in America and pointed the way to wins in five of the next six presidential cycles (and seven of the next 10).

But did the GOP's turn to the right in the mid-1960s really propel the party's later dominance, or was it the sequence of catastrophes that befell the country under LBJ and, later, Jimmy Carter?

Within months of winning, Johnson was escalating the Vietnam War and making his presidency hostage to it. In 1965, the year he pushed through Medicare and the Voting Rights Act, rioting broke out in Los Angeles. Unrest spread to other cities, and the era's turmoil in the country and its culture would take a toll we are still measuring today. Johnson and his party became symbols of disunity and turbulence, demons it has taken Democrats decades to exorcise.

Such boom-and-bust cycles are the dynamic for much of our presidential history. Republican Herbert Hoover looked to be on top of the world when he won all but eight states in 1928. He had been in office only months when the stock market crashed and began the downturn that became the Great Depression.

Richard Nixon won 49 states in 1972, and his disasters began immediately. As the Watergate scandal was followed by the first Arab oil embargo, recession, inflation and the fall of Saigon, the Democrats reached another apogee in the elections of 1974 and 1976 (when the country elected Carter).

Time and again, the mandates of majorities have been defeated by disasters that overtook the once all-powerful figure in the White House. And while they can't really talk about it in public, this is the one route most likely to bring the Republicans of today back to power in some still-to-be-determined tomorrow.

There's nothing new about this. In politics, it's simply the circle of life. And the cycles continue. In 2004, after John Kerry had failed to dislodge George W. Bush, many Republicans thought they had finally established what Karl Rove called "a durable majority." One thing was clear in that moment: There wasn't going to be any more good news for Democrats until there had been some very bad news for the country. And before long, there was.

First came Hurricane Katrina and its miserable aftermath. Then Iraq got bad enough to turn voters against the war and cost Republicans control of the House and Senate in 2006. The following year, cracks appeared in the success story of the American economy, and the next year those cracks split wide open and revealed how hollow our prosperity was at its core.

Parties dismissed from power the way Republicans were in 2006 and 2008 do not regain their standing simply by being better stewards of their own ideas and programs. It will take a fresh disaster befalling the country in the months or years ahead, one that will make the country forget about the Bush administration and turn its ire on Obama and the Democrats in Congress.

This week's smashing victory by Sen. Barack Obama and his Democratic cohorts completes one of the most dramatic power shifts in American political history. It has taken just over two years to transform the landscape of power both in Washington, D.C., and nationally.

It may be hard to remember, but after the re-election of George W. Bush in 2004, his partisans openly speculated about the death of the Democratic Party as we knew it. Presidential adviser Karl Rove told one GOP audience there were increasingly large sections of the country where it was no longer acceptable to call oneself a Democrat.

A raft of books came off the presses proclaiming the permanence of Republican majorities in Congress and the Electoral College. This apparent consensus quickly became a commonplace. So it was probably inevitable that voters would contradict it at their first opportunity.

Beginning in the first year of his second term, President Bush began to taste defeats. His ideas for overhauling the Social Security system were not so much defeated as simply ignored. His initial inattention to the Hurricane Katrina disaster left much of the nation aghast. Then the war in Iraq ran off the rails.

A disgruntled public punished the president's party in 2006, restoring Democratic control of both chambers of Congress. Then a growing number of people began registering as Democrats and checking out the conga line of presidential candidates parading around the country in 2007.

That extended show culminated in a struggle between the two most compelling of these White House prospects, one bidding to be the first female president and the other the first African-American (or biracial) president. By the time this duel was resolved in favor of Obama, the Democrats were creating the narrative of 2008 — a change election at a time when popular discontent was spreading and getting deeper.

The result of these two "change elections" in 2006 and 2008 has been that the Democrats, so recently left for dead, have captured about 50 seats in the House and more than a dozen in the Senate. These gains have restored the party to about the same level of strength it had in each chamber prior to the Republican tsunami of 1994 generally recalled as "the Gingrich revolution."

It was perhaps appropriate that Newt Gingrich himself, after a full decade's absence from Congress, was ubiquitous this fall offering unsolicited advice to his party's candidates, including presidential nominee Sen. John McCain.

All this seems worth noting right now as we turn a chapter title page in the nation's political annals. We are ending not just the era of the Presidents Bush and the Gingrich Congress but the epoch of Ronald Reagan, the man whose mere name has been a mantra for party stalwarts for three decades.

I covered my first congressional campaign in the fall of 1978, a race that resulted in the election of F. James Sensenbrenner Jr. to the House with a majority of 61 percent.

Sensenbrenner, a conservative Republican from the suburbs of Milwaukee, was just 35 at the time and eager to be part of a bright new era in Washington. He saw himself as an agent of change, part of a new movement intent on cleansing the federal establishment.

His timing was excellent, as 1978 was the year Republicans recovered from two disastrous elections and began winning back seats in the House and Senate. Sensenbrenner's freshman classmates included such future luminaries as Dick Cheney of Wyoming and Newt Gingrich of Georgia. And as President Jimmy Carter struggled with challenges foreign and domestic, these Young Turks of the House GOP felt the national political momentum shifting in their favor.

In 1980, the conservative rising tide reached flood stage in Reagan's presidential campaign. The GOP took over majority control of the Senate and achieved working control of the House in tandem with conservative Democrats. True believers such as Sensenbrenner were in their glory.

In the 1990s, the Gingrich-led charge into majority status brought Sensenbrenner a committee chairmanship and later a chance to be a House prosecutor in the impeachment trial of President Bill Clinton. He would lead the Judiciary Committee in the years after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

Altogether, Sensenbrenner has been able to serve under a Republican president or a Republican speaker of the House or both for all but four years of his 30-year career.

In the current Congress, he has been the senior Republican on the Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming. This week, at 65, he was re-elected to a 16th term, once again with little opposition. But one wonders how much longer he will stick around, trying to outlast his party's minority status.

Throughout the past three decades, the political energy that brought Sensenbrenner to office in the Reagan era has been the central force driving American politics most of the time. Certain arguments about taxes, national security and traditional social attitudes have been effective in election after election.

But now the experience of this year's campaign and the results of this week's vote suggest the age of Reagan may be passing, and with it the Bush dynasty, the Gingrich vision and the heydays of Messrs. Cheney and Sensenbrenner — and dozens of others like them.

Will this mean the end of the Republican Party? No. We will see a robust debate over the GOP's future, and we may see an altered version of the party emerge. New ideas will be offered and new faces will abound.

Before long, and perhaps before the Democrats think it possible, the next turning will come and these new Republicans will bring their party back. In the long run, it's all part of the process.

Let's say John McCain and the Republican Party pull off the biggest presidential upset in 60 years. Or let's say they lose but keep Barack Obama's margin well down in single digits. Either way, it will prove something fundamental about American politics that we all ought to bear in mind.

Even a historic change in an election does not change everything, and even what seems a major turning point is only one point in time.

America's swing voters seem poised to entrust the nation's future to Obama, a man many regard as a question mark — a mystery with multiracial roots and a foreign-sounding name. These voters also appear ready to elect the most decisively Democratic Congress in 30 years.

But if they do, let's remember it has taken the most extraordinary combination of circumstances to make it happen.

Some will say this election heralds the New Millennium, or the return of Big Government. But it more likely means simply this: Most of the country is ready to turn to the alternative party after a period of intense frustration with the Republican conservatives who have been in power in this decade.

That frustration is far more widely shared — across the full political spectrum — than a desire for Washington to exert more control over the economy or the society.

The prevailing element in this environment is the collapse of the presidency of George W. Bush. His approval ratings have plummeted from the 90s to the 20s, the most precipitous decline of its kind since polling began. And when presidents fall this dramatically in public esteem, the opposition party wins the next election.

Some on the right like to point out that the current Congress is even more unpopular than President Bush. But they elide the fact that Congress, unlike the White House, has two parties. When you probe a little deeper, you find that Hill Republicans are at least as vilified as the majority Democrats, if not more so.

That's one reason Democrats are about to gain half a dozen seats or more in the Senate this week, along with a net of 20 or more in the House (added to the 30 they captured in 2006). That would put them right back where they were in 1994, before the Republican takeover led by Newt Gingrich.

In sum, the Republican brand was in free fall even before the financial system seized up in mid-September, and the bad news has done nothing but accumulate since. Given all this, it is remarkable that McCain and his often haphazard campaign have not fallen off the edge of the earth.

Is McCain's competitiveness just a function of some voters' doubts about Obama? Surely there are those for whom he is just too different, too open to charges of "socialism" or perhaps too black for the White House.

McCain deserves credit for battling the headwinds he has faced: an unpopular president, an unpopular party, a miserable economy and a foreign policy based on wars with no end in sight. The nominee was also keenly aware that he was not the choice of his party's conservative base, an awareness that helped make Sarah Palin his running mate.

The Palin pick did revive the party's enthusiasm and vigor. Polls showed McCain nudging ahead, for about two weeks. But the Palin sugar rush dissipated quickly when the focus shifted to bank failures, Wall Street losses and a job-devouring recession.

Still, we have arrived at Election Day with McCain within striking distance. He has kept it suspenseful, narrowing the gap in the polls, demonstrating the power of the GOP's hold on the voters even in a profoundly Democratic year. The center-right era may be ending, but a new era has yet to be established, and McCain's underfunded and often incoherent campaign has proven how hard it is to beat a Republican — any Republican — in a presidential election.

Let us remember that only one Democrat has reached 51 percent of the popular vote since Franklin D. Roosevelt. That one Democrat was Lyndon B. Johnson in 1964. Jimmy Carter won in 1976 with just 50.1 percent, and Harry Truman, John F. Kennedy and Bill Clinton all fell short of 50 percent.

Polls show Obama's lead among likely voters to be as wide as double digits or as narrow as 4 points. Pollsters say the important thing is that all these polls show Obama winning and that he benefits from the state-by-state distribution of the vote in the Electoral College (the only tally that matters).

But we also know that Republicans come home and right-leaning independents revert to pattern. Longtime poll watchers cannot be surprised that McCain's vote share has climbed higher in the 40s in the closing days. And Democrats can't forget the misleading early exit polls of Election Day 2004.

America may be poised on the brink of great change, but it is hesitating in the moment. And if, in the end, the nation does take the plunge, Democrats should not forget the dread and doubt they felt on this election eve.

Yes, a change election challenges what we know about the parties and the voters. But much of what we know as political reality will survive that challenge. It will be relevant to governing in 2009, and it will be back for the elections of 2010 and beyond.