SO WHAT WAS TUESDAY'S ELECTION ABOUT? Victor Davis Hanson on what the election was not about. Here's the summary:

The truth is always the simplest explanation. Here it goes in simple language from the beginning: Obama was elected largely because of public furor over Bush/Iraq. The fawning media hid his socialist background. He ran as a centrist. The Wall Street meltdown wiped away the small McCain/Palin lead. Obama in his hubris took that flukish set of events and reinvented them into proof that he could deliver to the left a once-in-a-century EU-style socialist makeover of America. That effort polarized the country, stalled the recovery, and terrified the private sector into stasis. Obama, who was always himself given something (take your pick—Harvard admission, Harvard Law Review billet, Chicago Law School tenure offer, Noble Peace Prize, etc.) without requisite achievement, is thus stunned that the economy is not a malleable law school dean whom he can hope and change into compliance. So naturally he is angry and has turned to almost everything in the past that worked: the race card, the get-out-the-minority vote card, the enemy Republican bad actors, the greedy rich takers, etc.. But now none of the old “them” bogeymen work; the more that tactic is tried, the more the economy stalls and the people get angry. It’s that simple.

As with anything Hanson writes, read it all.