Here’s Mark Halperin’s analysis of the Democratic Party:

Is it hyperbolic to say the Democratic Party is in the midst of a nervous breakdown? I have been covering national politics since 1988, and I don’t remember a situation quite like this. The signs of a crack-up are everywhere.

Halperin devotes the rest of his piece to explaining why “Thursday seemed to have donkeys melting down all over the place.”

I should add that for months and months, Halperin’s colleague Joe Klein gleefully mocked those writing for CONTENTIONS (most especially yours truly) for predicting that “the sky is falling” (a phrase Klein used endlessly) for Obama and Democrats. That is because we predicted long before the election — based on perfectly easy-to-read-and-analyze polling data — that Democrats were going to be routed. And in fact they were.

It turns out that the sky really did fall — and the man who portrayed himself as the professional among amateurs, the grizzled political reporter who has seen everything and heard everything, was really quite wrong on almost everything.