Even some of the most partisan liberals understand that voters in Massachusetts sent a pretty clear message on Tuesday night. Rep. Anthony Weiner got it. Even liberal columnist Joan Vennochi of the Boston Globe, who served throughout the campaign as an extension of Martha Coakley's press office, got the message.

But if you peruse the various statements coming out of the White House, up to and including the President himself, it's not nearly as clear that members of this administration have gotten the message from Tuesday night.

Yesterday morning David Axelrod made a number of media appearances where he declared that stopping the push for health care would be "the worst possible outcome" and "was not an option."

At the press briefing yesterday Robert Gibbs responded to questions about Tuesday night's vote by saying things like the following:

"the President hears and understands the anger.  It's very similar to what he heard and understood -- has heard and understood for many years.  It is important to the President that we continue to push forward on the priorities of fighting for what's important to the middle class...

...it's a lot of what we heard in Iowa, right?  It was a lot of what we heard in the general election.  It was a lot of what, quite frankly, he heard as a U.S. senator...

...we can and should get health care reform done this year...

...the President would be the first to tell you that the pace in changing the way Washington works he is not satisfied in.

Mitch Stewart, the director of Obama's grassroots organization, sent out an email to supporters on Wednesday that began, "Yesterday's disappointing election results show deep discontent with the pace of change."

And the President himself, in an interview yesterday with George Stephanopoulos, seemed to subscribe to a similar interpretation of Tuesday night:

OBAMA: The same thing that swept Scott Brown into office swept me into office.

STEPHANOPOULOS: But it sounds like you're saying -- no second thoughts on your fundamental strategy?

OBAMA: Well look, what I would say is that first of all, I wish we had gotten it done faster because I think that if we had gotten health care done faster, people would have understood the degree to which every single day George, health care is part of a broader context of how am I going to be able to move the middle class forward in a more secure and stable way...

Put all of these things together and it certainly seems that the lesson the White House appears to have taken away from Tuesday night is that voters are not upset with Obama's policies, they are upset with the slow 'pace of change' coming out of Washington and the fact that those policies (like the stimulus, for example) have not manifested themselves in a positive way in people's everyday lives.  Ergo, the best thing the White House can do in the aftermath of Tuesday is to continue to move forward as fast as possible with its agenda - including passing health care - and do a better job of communicating the benefits of that agenda to the public.

The problem, obviously, is that the real message from Tuesday night is almost exactly the opposite: the man who ran explicitly to provide the 41st vote to stop the jamming through of health care and to be "an independent voice" won by five points in one of the most reliably blue states in the nation against a woman who was 100% behind Barack Obama's agenda.

Maybe this is all just the President and his staff spinning, putting the best possible face on a politically disastrous loss.  But - and this is what should scare a lot of Democrats who are up for reelection this year - maybe it isn't.

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