After Mass. Senate Shocker, It's Time For Obama Team To 'Recalibrate'

"For Dems, Finger-Pointing Follows Mass. Loss."

That's the headline on our colleague Liz Halloran's story this morning, in which she looks at the "recriminations" already being leveled in the wake of "Republican Scott Brown's stunning capture of the Massachusetts Senate seat held for nearly five decades by the late Democrat Edward Kennedy."

Other reports are analyzing what the election result means for President Barack Obama, and especially for his health care overhaul initiative since Democrats will no longer control a 60-vote "super majority" in the Senate. Bill Galston, an adviser in the Clinton administration, tells NPR's Mara Liasson that it's time for the Obama team to "pause, reflect, recalibrate." If the current administration signals to voters that it's going to be "steady as she goes," Galston warns, discontent will only grow:

Over at NPR's Shots blog, Scott Hensley says "the Kennedy seat in the Senate is gone. With its loss, Democrats' hopes for passing an overhaul of the nation's health system have faded, too."

NPR's Political Junkie Ken Rudin, by the way, is looking at "how Scott Brown did it."

Meanwhile, as you might imagine, the morning-after analyses in the political blogosphere are quite pointed:

— At the conservative RedState.com, Erick Erickson writes that "a year ago today, Barack Obama was sworn in as President of the United States. Today, he wakes up rejected by the independents who elected him and a social pariah within the Democrat Party."

— Markos Moulitsas Zuniga, founder of the liberal Daily Kos, though, looks ahead and says that because Brown has to run for re-election in 2012, he'll either have to offend his supporters "by casting votes with Democrats in order to shore up his standing at home; or he votes in lockstep with the rest of his party and becomes the nation's most unpopular senator."

— Carol Platt Liebau at the conservative Townhall.com thinks "there's no way for the Democrats to spin this one. On Sunday, the President himself made the election a referendum on his and the Democrats' agenda."

— And at the liberal FireDogLake, Jon Walker looks ahead and says this: "Let me put this as simply as possible. Democrats control everything in Washington right now. They control the White House. They have a huge margins in the House and in the Senate. Democrats have larger margins in both chambers than any party has had for decades. They have zero excuses for failing to deliver. Americans will not find some nonsense about having only 59 Senate seats as an acceptable excuse for failing to accomplish anything. If Democrats think they can win in 2010 by running against Republican obstructionism, they will lose badly."