I don’t know if you remember Irwin Allen’s original 1972 Poseidon Adventure, but I’ll never forget it: I was ten years old, it was my first disaster movie, and Gene Hackman was like a living god to me.

The thing about disaster movies, as a genre, is that they’re designed to make you experience the disaster not just vicariously, but in some real, physical way. You’re supposed to feel trapped, and claustrophobic, and desperate.

In fact, when the genre hit its baroque period, studios used equipment like Sens-A-Round to transmit actual shock waves into the theaters.

But Sens-A-Round never really cut it for me. It was trying too hard to do what The Poseidon Adventure managed with just one brilliant high concept: an overturned oceanliner, full of survivors who have no idea which way is up.

So I never again witnessed that same dizzying mixture of dread and confusion and desperation. At least until the 2000 and 2004 Presidential elections.

If you remember November 2000, Clinton’s eight years in office had left us with a pretty cushy ship. Al Gore and Joe Lieberman were barnstorming Florida, imploring voters to “keep the prosperity going.”

They had Joe-mentum, or so the papers said.

Then Florida was moved into Gore’s column, and as quickly moved out again.

And the world went belly up for Democrats. Democrats blamed Gore, blamed themselves. Bush began to govern far more conservatively and aggressively than most anyone had predicted, and Democrats — especially following 9/11 — were utterly rudderless.

By the run-up to the 2004 election, the party had split into two loud factions: those who wanted to attack Bush for the failures of the Iraq War, and those who wanted to hug him close on the War, and fight the election on domestic issues.

For me, it was like watching the Poseidon Adventure all over again, with the survivors trapped inside the ship unable to agree which way is up. In the film, half do what seems only logical — they climb up, but to their doom. And the other half — Gene Hackman’s people — attempt the counter-intuitive: they descend, but toward salvation.

The thing is, though, neither group knows whether they’ve chosen correctly, until it’s too late to go back.

Which brings us, of course, to Howard Dean’s Fifty-State Strategy. Democrats should funnel money to all fifty states, Dean argued in 2005, regardless of whether a state seemed destined to become a key battleground in the coming cycle. Critics said the strategy would leave the party defenseless where the money was needed most.

But last night it became clear that Dean was right.

Investing in party structure nationally, even in ruby-red states, left Democrats well-prepared to capitalize on a wave of anti-incumbent sentiment. Pick-ups in the West, the Mid-West and the South fueled Democrats’ take-over of the House, and kept alive the prospect of Senate control as well.

Now, there’s a moment at the bitter end of the Poseidon Adventure, when Gene Hackman has bullied and dragged his people to the engine room, and they’re huddled there, where the ship’s metal skin is thinnest, without any idea whether they’ll live or die.

And that’s when they hear rescuers banging on the hull.

Within minutes, a torch is cutting an escape hatch, and then suddenly they’re out in the open air, helicopters hovering all around them.

And last Tuesday night, at the Democrats’ Burlington Victory Party, that’s all I could think about: the end of the Poseidon Adventure [Cue up Maureen McGovern, “There’s Got To Be A Morning After”].

A clean sea breeze, and Maureen McGovern singing about the morning after.

[This piece aired first on Vermont Public Radio. The audio file is available here.]