Aftershock.

The NYT sums up morning-after reaction, outside the academies and professional liberal institutions:

“Maybe not everyone in their party is willing to put their heads down and bully through as if nothing has happened after losing elections in Virginia, New Jersey, and perhaps Massachusetts,” writes Betsy Newmark.
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“Some Democrats want to push through their same health care plan that people are rejecting. You have Dick Durbin, the number two Democrat in the Senate, openly discussing the ‘nuclear option’ - pushing through the Senate bill in the House and then trying to adjust things through reconciliation.”

Newmark points to Joe Lieberman and to Senator Evan Bayh’s comments that “There’s going to be a tendency on the part of our people to be in denial about all this … [but] if you lose Massachusetts and that’s not a wake-up call, there’s no hope of waking up.”
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Ramesh Ponnuru of the Corner doesn’t think much of those inmates’ first instincts: “There are a lot of signs that the Ds are going to go on an anti-Wall Street jag to try to save themselves. If their political assumptions are correct, shouldn’t the bank tax—which Brown opposed—have worked better for Coakley?”

Of all the Democrats who voted for Brown, the most unlikely may have been Ray Flynn, the former Democratic mayor of Boston. He explained his reasoning to Ben Smith of the Politico:

“People feel like their vote is being taken granted with this powerful, one party state, and with one-party government in Washington. People want a little coalition, and a little respect… I don’t know how you regroup from something like this. There are going to be a lot of problems in the Democratic party from here on out.”