Today the Post’s Mary Beth Sheridan writes that the effort to grant District residents even a modicum of voting representation isn’t waiting for better talking points — it’s waiting for better politicians. According to the article, the fight for District voting rights may get its biggest boost in 2009 if a Democrat is elected president and if the Democratic Party can increase its numbers in the U.S. Senate.

Despite the Senate setback, the latest effort is by no means over. Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman (I-Conn.), a co-sponsor of the measure, said he’ll try to pick up a few key votes in the next year. If that fails, he said, “I will be ready to start this again in the 111th Congress,” beginning in 2009.

Voting rights activists predict next year’s elections will result in a Senate — and possibly a White House — more favorable to the bill.

Though it’s depressing that a democratic right denied to no other American citizen would take a wholesale change of Congress and the White House to move forward, patience is something of which District residents seem to have plenty. There probably isn’t much of a difference when an injustice goes on for 206 or 208 years.

Hopefully waiting for 2009 will be like the agonizing day before your 10th birthday when you totally knew you were going to get that G.I. Joe F-14 Tomcat fighter jet. But then your parents acted like they hadn’t gotten it for you, and you got all sad. But then they had gotten it for you, it was just hidden away to be given to you after dinner. Boy, 2009’s gonna be sweet, what with that F-14 Tomcat — errrrr — we mean those voting rights.