Just as the votes began to trickle in, and the pundits got a whiff of what was coming, they turned to a host of excuses and justifications that ranged from impressively acrobatic to downright ludicrous.Claire McCaskill of Missouri blamed her state's Senate seat loss, in which Roy Blount easily vanquished Robin Carnahan, on (what else?) voter ignorance, saying that most voters in Missouri weren't even aware that Democrats had actually cut taxes.
Eugene Robinson and Marc Lamont Hill turned to the familiar liberal rhetoric that Democrats didn't sufficiently or effectively communicate their successes on health care and the economic stimulus, despite the fact that most Democratic candidates conspicuously decided to run on neither.
And choosing to totally ignore national polls stating otherwise, MSNBC's Keith Olbermann said that if Republicans ended up making significant gains, it wouldn't be because Democrats had done too much, but because they hadn't done enough.
Finally, when most of the races had been determined, and the Republican victory was sealed, the spin kicked into fourth gear as pundits earnestly tried to offer up their silver-lining takes.
Politico's Patrick Gavin insisted it could have been much worse for Democrats - they could have lost Congressional stalwarts Harry Reid, Barbara Boxer and Barney Frank. So, we should count Dems lucky for retaining three of the most reviled elected officials in America?
Olbermann didn't find the Republican gains in the House - the largest single-party gain in decades - to be very newsworthy. "It is large. It is not historic."
And for his MSNBC buddy Rachel Maddow, Harry Reid's fairly predictable win over problematic Tea Party newcomer Sharron Angle was cause for unprecedented hyperbole. She opined that Angle's loss "is such a disaster for the Republican party, it's hard to overstate." Wait...just did!
Others faced a little difficulty spinning the contentious issue of campaign financing, blaming losses like Russ Feingold's in Wisconsin on a shadowy influx of corporate funding to his opponent Ron Johnson, but gloating over the losses of big-spending candidates like Meg Whitman, Linda McMahon and Carly Fiorina.
And some were just plain bitter. Markos Moulitsas tweeted "It'll be funny when the teabaggers realize that 1) Obama is still President on Wednesday, and 2) when their impeachment dreams go nowhere."
The truth is, for some of these operatives, spin is their profession. No one expected Pelosi or Van Hollen to be honest about the Democrats' dim outlook while people were still out voting.
But for the rest, this midterm election was proof that objectivity is hard to come by in the media. When the left spent six months deriding Sharron Angle as a fringe lunatic whom no one in their right mind would actually vote for, they're not exactly credible when they subsequently go on to celebrate the grandiose implications of Reid's eventual (and slim) victory.
But one thing is certain - the aftermath spin was the perfect bookend to what has been a frenetic, dirty, ugly and sometimes hilarious election season. Can't wait for 2012.
(S.E. Cupp, New York Daily News)
