Your Abbreviated Pundit Round-up

How do you apply for the position of "pundit" and "sage"? The easiest way is to misread the lessons of a special election, and then write about it for a major newspaper. Warning: the least thought out and most incorrect columns will take a day or so more to write.

Dan Balz:

Contests serve as warning to Democrats: It's not 2008 anymore

Neither gubernatorial election amounted to a referendum on the president, but the changing shape of the electorates in both states and the shifts among key constituencies revealed cracks in the Obama 2008 coalition and demonstrated that, at this point, Republicans have the more energized constituency heading into next year's midterm elections.

That's especially true if you run away from the Democrats and the President, who did just as well in the exit poll as he did in the election of 2008. So maybe it is still 2008 if you're Obama, and maybe Deeds doesn't represent 2008.

See Balz, who covers his bases with

Tuesday's elections provided the first tangible evidence that Republicans can win their support with the right kind of candidates and the right messages. That is an ominous development for Democrats if it continues unabated into next year. But Republicans could squander that opportunity if they demand candidates who are too conservative to appeal to the middle.

If?

NYT:

Democrats won a special election in New York State’s northernmost Congressional district Tuesday, a setback for national conservatives who heavily promoted a third candidate in what became an intense debate over the direction of the Republican Party.

While Republicans celebrate VA, they implode in NY.

Ruth Marcus writing in Balz' paper:

Advice to readers about the coming orgy of analysis about the New Jersey and Virginia gubernatorial elections: Ignore it. Disquisitions on The Meaning of It All for President Obama or the 2009 results as a harbinger for Congress in 2010 have scant basis in reality.

Oops. How did that column slip in?

EJ Dionne:

No one expects that young voters will be as excited by this year’s election (or by next year’s midterms) as they were by Obama’s own candidacy. But Democrats are more dependent on young voters than ever before – something I wrote about earlier this fall. Virginia should bring home to them the imperative of mobilizing the millennials with more than just a nice ad toward the end of a campaign.

Maureen Dowd:  

In those days, [Rush Limbaugh] called himself a "harmless little fuzzball." He’s a lot less harmless now. I went on to columny, as my pal Bill Safire called it, and Rush went on to calumny.

As he and Sarah Palin conduct their auto-da-fé of moderate Republicans — "Moderates by definition have no principles," he told his radio audience on Monday — Limbaugh is more than ever the face of his party, as Rahm Emanuel said.

He’s also the mouth.

Final word goes to Harold Meyerson:

Republicans can claim shouting rights in Virginia and New Jersey, and the Democrats have picked up that furiously contested House seat in northern New York state (which gives the Democrats 49 House members and the Republicans two in America’s northeast corner -- New England and New York). But there can be no joy on Wall Street. The two aging financial whiz kids on tonight’s ballots -- former Goldman Sachs CEO Jon Corzine and Bloomberg’s Michael Bloomberg -- seriously underperformed.