Gail Collins in the New York Times on the media’s obsession with the idea that Tuesday’s election results were some kind of huge national rebuke to President Obama:

No wonder the White House said [Obama] was not watching the results come in. How could the man have gotten any sleep after he realized that his lukewarm support of an inept candidate whose most notable claim to fame was experience in hog castration was not enough to ensure a Democratic victory in Virginia?

New Jersey was even worse. The defeat of Gov. Jon Corzine made it clear that the young and minority voters who turned out for Obama will not necessarily show up at the polls in order to re-elect an uncharismatic former Wall Street big shot who failed to deliver on his most important campaign promises while serving as the public face of a state party that specializes in getting indicted.

The very weirdest part of this is that I’ve been hearing and reading over and over that the fact that the voter turnout in this off-year election was lower than in last year’s presidential election shows that America is turning against Obama. Hel-lo? That this happens in every off-year election has been conventional wisdom (oh, I think I made a little joke there) for at least as long as I’ve been old enough to be aware of our politic process, and I’m not a young guy any more.

Well, whaddaya know. Who knew that so many of our pundits are recent immigrants to our country?