Perhaps the wisest assessment of Tuesday’s election came from an unlikely source, the oft-irresponsible Senate Majority Leader, Nevada’s Harry Reid. “This is a mandate to get along, to get something done in a bipartisan way,” he said. “This is not a mandate for a political party or an ideology.”

The reason it’s not an ideological mandate of the sort given to the conservative Ronald Reagan in 1980 is because, unlike Reagan (who also won a much bigger victory), the liberal Barack Obama did as much to shade his ideology as to proclaim it. He continually pledged to soften differences, not to stress them. And he consistently emphasized proposals more often associated with conservatives than liberals: tax cuts, greater numbers of military personnel, and a “net spending cut” for the federal government (even if his spending numbers never came close to adding up). In short, despite what the liberal “Center for American Progress” claimed in a triumphant day-after report, this victory certainly was not “a progressive mandate.”