From Ezra Klein at the Washington Post:

The end of the 'do-something' Congress

...if you see the point of politics as actually getting things done, the last two years, for Democrats, have been a stunning, historic success. Whatever else you can say about the 111th Congress, it got things done.

There was health-care reform, of course. ... There was financial regulation, too. ... Then there was the stimulus. Too small? Absolutely. Were there votes to make it much bigger? Probably not.

And those are just the big bills: The 111th Congress also passed Ted Kennedy's national service legislation, and the expansion of the Children's Health Insurance Program to four million more kids, and new regulations on tobacco, and the Lily Ledbetter Fair Pay Act.

... What's been uncommon about the past two years is that the Democrats in Congress managed to put aside enough of their disagreements to get big, important things done, things they really believed would make this country better, things they'd been fighting and working for and trying to do for decades.

That this has been the most "do-something" Congress we've seen in 40 years hasn't made much of an impression on the public. Multiple polls have found that only a minority of voters know that the 111th Congress got more done than most congresses. That's true even among Democrats. Nor has their productivity made the 111th Congress popular. But if they failed as politicians, they succeeded as legislators. And legislating is, at least in theory, what they came to Washington to do.