Scott Baugh and Frank Barbaro, Orange County’s top political bosses, on Tuesday had their traditional election-night dinner again.

This time the party chairmen dined at the Club House restaurant at South Coast Plaza. When I caught up with them the outcome of the presidential race was not quite clear. I figured Barack Obama for the winner, though, because three major networks had called Pennsylvania for him. John McCain needed to flip that state from red to blue to complete his narrow path to victory. Still, if he could get Ohio and Florida he had a shot.

Then we found out Ohio had gone in the Obama win column.

Baugh still wasn’t ready to concede. As he likes to say, the GOTV doesn’t end until the guy with the white hair says so. That moment came about 8:15 p.m. But we weren’t quite there yet.

Still, I felt they both knew what would happen. They are seasoned number crunchers and the polls looked so daunting for the Arizona senator.

“The key to not being depressed is acceptance,” Baugh quipped.

 So they both debated how Obama would govern.

Baugh worries that Obama would govern as an ultra-liberal, but Barbaro was convinced that President-elect Obama would govern as a pragmatic centrist.

“He’s a liberal’s liberal and I don’t think this country’s ready to be that liberal,” Baugh said.

“He’s going to look at things from the standpoint of what will work,” Barbaro said.

Baugh countered that Barbaro was indulging in wishful thinking, projecting his own centrist beliefs on to Obama. Baugh thinks Obama is clever enough to know that if he yanks the country too far to the left he will hurt himself with independent voters and could get punished in the mid-term elections.

Me, I don’t know. I don’t think any of us know. Some presidents get intoxicated with power and their egos prevail. We saw that four years ago when President Bush missed the signs that the country was still so deeply divided and he bragged he had some political capital to spend. So he went about trying to reform Social Security. His approval ratings sank and they’ve been dropping like an anchor ever since. President Clinton did the same thing. He had a Democratic majority and tried to run things his way. Remember “Don’t ask, don’t tell?” and his disastrous ramrodding of healthcare reform onto even members of his own party in Congress? He got punished in the mid-term elections, too.

Baugh doesn’t like Obama’s middle-class tax-cut plan.

“If you give 95% of the country a tax cut it has to come from somewhere,” Baugh said, referring to the top earners who would pay more under an Obama plan.

 “They’re the job creators,” Baugh said of the country’s top earners.

“More like the job shippers,” Barbaro countered, referring to how many corporations have taken their tax cuts and moved jobs overseas for the cheaper labor.

Both men recognize that a lot of healing has to happen now. The country remains divided in many ways.

“We’re beyond ideology now,” Barbaro said. “We have to be problem solvers.”

Ironically, Obama’s victory makes Baugh’s job easier, he said.

“We go back to basics of limited government. We set a standard that people are calling for,” Baugh said.

Republicans in DC made a mistake running up huge deficits under Bush and now they have to learn the lesson, Baugh said. It’s why we’re seeing so many more “decline to state” voters. Those are “disaffected Republicans,” Baugh said.

Barbaro recalled how in 1978 he had managed to make Democrats the majority party, and then he retired. It was post-Watergate, Jimmy Carter was midway through his term and Gov. Jerry Brown ruled California.

But then the Reagan Revolution came two years later and the GOP has reigned since then.

My how things come full circle. Barbaro predicts Brown will return to the governor’s office and the Democrats are picking up registrations.

“In the past 15 months the Democrats have netted 60,000 new registrations,” Barbaro said.

Baugh was quick to point out that happened “in the context” of an unpopular war in Iraq, an unpopular Republican president and a collapse of the markets.

Barbaro believes Obama’s victory will help generate more fundraising for the Democrats in Orange County. That, of course, remains to be seen.

By the time of dinner’s end, Ohio had been called for Obama and it was pretty clear he would win, so I asked Baugh what his thoughts were on the historic nature of the first black commander in chief.

“It’s important to this country. It’s a unique point in time,” Baugh said. “But it should be more about the direction of the country than the color of a man’s skin.”

“The United States has finally come of age,” Barbaro added.

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