Outside of MA Republicans kicked a lot of Democratic ass last night.  (Ezra Klein with the Big Picture here, 9 takeaways from the 2014 election.)  When you (we) lose that badly you need to do a reality-based self-assessment.   I’ll offer my thoughts later this week.   In the interim, Kevin Baker in the NY Times, President Obama Is Not a Happy Warrior:

This appears to have been a baffling rejection to this supremely detached president, whose supporters have been protesting that the public just does not appreciate all he has done — a list that invariably includes Obamacare, a revived stock market and an unemployment mark that has inched slowly downward.

What the White House doesn’t seem to appreciate is just how little a dent this has made in the devastating loss of wealth, security and opportunity so many Americans have experienced in the last few years. But this administration has also been afflicted almost from the start with the inability to decide just whom it is trying to appeal to.

Like Bill Clinton before him, this New Democrat president early on dismissed traditional liberals as “professional leftists” as his first press secretary once put it. But just a few months ago he also let his new F.C.C. chairman suggest an end to net neutrality, and his secretary of education heartily endorse the decision of a Republican judge ending teacher tenure, in which said judge claimed “there are a significant number of grossly ineffective teachers currently active in California classrooms.”

Well, which is it? Are you trying to build the new, white-collar Democratic Party or not, and if so, where do you expect these people to come from?

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From The Wichita Eagle, More than 21,000 Kansans’ voter registrations in suspense because of proof of citizenship:

De Anna Allen has served on a jury. She has served her country.

So she was surprised when she couldn’t vote.

Allen went to cast a ballot in the primary election in August and poll workers couldn’t find her name among the list of registered voters. She did cast a ballot, but it was provisional and did not count.

Allen was among 27,131 people statewide who had signed up to vote but whose registrations were considered in suspense, or limbo, as of Oct. 14, the last day to register before the midterm election. Most of them – 23,026, including Allen – had not yet provided proof of citizenship. By Friday, the state had whittled that number to 21,473….

The numbers of Kansans with incomplete registration because of citizenship are highest among the young and unaffiliated, an Eagle analysis found. Statewide, 12,327 people who identified as unaffiliated had their registrations suspended because of lack of proof of citizenship, compared with 4,787 who identified as Republicans, 3,948 who identified as Democrats and 361 who identified as Libertarians. Not all who applied identified a party, records requested by The Wichita Eagle from the state show.

The number of men and women with suspended registrations was split pretty evenly….