this is an adventure

Virginia Sen. Mark Warner, smarter perhaps than the Obama White House’s political office, knows there’s no sense grousing, telling Politico “We got walloped.” Other Democrats said they’re “‘very, very sensitive’ to the fact that issues being pushed by party leaders ‘have the potential to cost some of our front-line members their seats.’”

The Treasury Department does some outreach to key financial bloggers, and is deluged with questions and criticisms. “I challenged the STO that he had a poor choice of words in describing the stress tests as designed to restore a level of confidence, rather than to determine which banks were healthy and which were insolvent.”

Simon Heffer mourns what might have been: “Never in American politics has someone come to power on such a bubble of expectation; never, inevitably, has the pricking of that bubble caused such shock… The rhetoric that bore Mr Obama to office proved equal to electoral success, but not to economic management.”

Barone: “From the 1996 election up through and including 2008, affluent counties in the East, Midwest and West have trended Democratic, largely through distaste for the religious and cultural conservatives… Now, with the specter of higher tax rates and a vastly expanded public sector, they may be—possibly—headed in the other direction.”