As you say, Dems have never been considered a unified party:

"I am not a member of any organized party — I am a Democrat." --Will Rogers

;-)

You go the extra mile with this answer. Thank you. The problem has been in defining "effective control". As far as I've understood things, the Democrats were in charge of Congress since Speaker Pelosi and Majority Leader Reid took over. Some confusion has erupted where folks on Twitter have claimed my state's senior senator was never in charge before President Obama's election.

Thank you for the kind words in your last message, stephenk. The sad reality and probably the source of some scattered Twitterers' confusion on the subject was that while the 2006 election did shut down President Bush's more expansive goals relating to the creation of a dictatorial Presidency that doesn't really need a Congress (as in Roman Empereor Augustus retaining the trappings of the Roman Republic including the Senate and the expression of the Roman State's source of political legitimacy within the succinct initials SPQR ("Senatus Populusque Romanorum") , the Democratic Party's thin majorities and troublesome Blue Dog Democrats (who tended to join the Republicans on too many key issues), resulted in a general inability to push their programs forward in the face of that thinness, and the hostility of a veto-wielding Roman-Empire-admiring President Bush. The real accomplishment of the return of Congress to the Democrats was to slow down the Bush Administration, and to revive the traditional Congressional oversight functionality. Sadly, it didn't help that both major parties fed at the same trough of corporate largesse, so that any bold initiatives of either party that could negatively affect the interests of their donor corporate overlords, have until just recently, always been released in a weaker less-toothy version that guaranteed the continuation of corporate dominance over the Congressional political parties and the overall direction of the American Political System that tended to reinforce the permanence of that corporate dominance.

Thusly, and because of these realities, 2006 wasn't a Revolution that had any statues of George Bush being toppled Saddam-Hussein style, but a rebalancing and re-emhasis toward slightly-less corporatism, which then led to fostering an environment by 2008 that made President Obama's successful run for the presidency a reality.

And this subtle yet significant wind-change in 2006 could lead some people to postulate that it took the clear mandate of the 2008 to energize and activate the congressional power that the Democratic party traditionally has hewed to.

It's clear that the 2008 results signalled the consolidation of a popular will around the twin ideas of an intelligent and effective President and an equally effective Congress, now that a President was in office who had a wider and more-nuanced grasp of the world than the grasp that was obtainable at a Texas oil company and baseball team franchise, in between all the wild drug-saturated parties.

That determination by the American People, to install a government that took bold and effective action came to the fore just in time (we hope), as the results of an unregulated and rapacious greed-based capitalism were clearly that these uncaring self-centered money-grabbers began dismantling their own companies by looting the balance sheets of these sinking concerns with undeserved bonuses which only guaranteed that the speed with which their ships were sinking accelerated as the looters managed to deploy their life boats to get away from the impending disaster, also not caring that those remaining on the ship were now doomed, so long as *their* (the bonus-recipients') own treasure was not touched by a suddenly-newly-meddlesome government and angered populace.

With the crisis entering a perilous phase as President Obama assumed office, it took the combination of a reinvigorated Presidency and a newly-strengthened Congress to get the grip on and begin taming an economy, that if not dealt with forcefully, rapidly and effectively by our central government, threatened to plunge the entire planet into an economic Ice Age.

What we don't know yet is whether these first three months of a most-effective Presidency and Congress will quickly restore the economy to its former greatness, or whether larger forces that still threaten the planet's economic stability will continue to exert their influence, such that rather than avoid a Second Great Depression, all the Democrats in the White House and Congress have so rapidly thus far accomplished is a merely-slowing-down-and thus-prolonging of the economic disaster which resulted from lethal injuries dealt to the economy by the greedy excesses of the radically self-aggrandizing financial products & services dealers, because perhaps even the strong programs enacted to revive the economy have arrived too late to save the "patient" from his/her, increasingly powerful death-inducing spiral downwards.