closing thoughts on the day America didn't die

Mark Steyn on the Miracle in Massachusetts:

On Sunday, the line from Obama, Kerry, and everyone else to the voters of Massachusetts was:

"We understand why you're angry. But don't let your anger with George W. Bush allow you to get tricked into voting for a Republican who'll obstruct the reform agenda you're crying out for."

Presumably even Patrick Kennedy isn't stupid enough to believe this. Even as elite condescension to the boob masses, it barely passes muster. But I wonder if they really understand what took place today. Until a few days ago, conventional wisdom in Massachusetts had it that the GOP had a motivated base but nothing more. Under any normal model, high turnout should have favored the Dems. Instead, significant numbers of people who voted for Obama crossed over to the Republicans. It was as explicit a repudiation of the last year as could be devised.

The course the "post-partisan healer" chose to set on January 20, 2009, led directly to his debacle on January 19, 2010. As a woman who managed to hold at least a couple of Kennedy seats once sang: Happy Birthday, Mister President!

Yuval Levin adds this in a piece called The Self-Inflicted Wound:

It is a mark of the degree of political malpractice the Democrats have been guilty of over the past year, of the degree of their overreach and recklessness, that being left with 59 senators — a huge majority by any measure, and the same majority they had when Obama was inaugurated a year ago — is now somehow enough to make it seem as though they are powerless and is likely to kill the core (and almost the entirety) of their domestic agenda, and leave them rudderless and reeling.

They are of course not in fact powerless at all. But they have adopted an agenda that only a supermajority could pass (if that, even a supermajority couldn’t pass cap and trade), and with every indication of public opposition have only intensified their determination to pursue it, putting themselves on the wrong side of independent voters while persuading themselves that people would come around because this health-care bill is something liberals have wanted for three generations. They have made it impossible for themselves to change course without a massive loss of face and of political capital. But however costly, that change will now need to come. You have to wonder if the people responsible for setting this course — and especially Rahm Emanuel and the House and Senate leadership — will still be standing when it’s all done with.

I agree with Mr. Levin. When the dust settles the House and Senate will have different leadership. In fact I believe that even now Nancy Pelosi is Speaker in name only.

And, yes, there could even be a major shakeup in the White House. Barack Obama was repudiated on Tuesday and no one realizes that more keenly than the preening narcissist himself.

Obama has been wounded and since he is congenitally incapable of accepting responsibility himself and this time George W Bush will not serve as an acceptable scapegoat.

Whose head will roll?