I hesitated to discuss Charlie Cook's newsletter today because you have to sign up to get it by email. And thus I can't link to it. And you -- the esteemed TPM reader -- cannot easily read it. But he has some very sage points to make about how much last Tuesday's election is being over-interpreted. It wasn't a wave or a rout and certainly not some decisive election result. There's no reason to have a Slate Dialog with the headline "Can the Democrats Be Revived?"

Part of what happened is that Democrats just underestimated the continuing post-9/11 salience of national security issues. But more generally, to me, this was the wifflebat election. Democrats put very little on the table, didn't run that aggressively. And since they put very little on the table the Republicans were able to knock them back with the fairly weak cudgel of a presidential barnstorm and some misleading but relatively effective hits on the Homeland Security Department issue. The Dems came into the election ill-prepared and the President beat them with a wifflebat. You can't take their victory away from them. But it was still just a wifflebat.