Chait's crucial warning to Democrats

Jonathan Chait offers up true wisdom as the Democrats stare at disaster in Massachusetts, pointing out that any party that's been in power for a year when there's 10% unemployment is going to get hammered; that in the face of major recession Obama's popularity has in fact proved remarkably durable; that commentators always underestimate structural factors moving popular opinion and find faux cause and effect in the parties' and politicians' strategic choices; that Republicans' political strength is their dogged willingness to "ignore establishment nostrums in the face of defeat" whereas Democrats tend to panic and stampede; and that Obama's supreme challenge now will be to play "George Bailey in the bank run" and calm his party's panic (a role, I would add, to which he's supremely suited and has played before).

The nub of Chait's insight is his critique of