Republicans around the country are celebrating this morning. So are the Tea Partiers. So, I assume, is Joe Lieberman.

But Republican Scott Brown's capturing of Ted Kennedy's Senate seat has left me sad. And really worried.

Getting a health-care bill passed now seems nearly impossible. And with the testosterone raging in the Republican Party and some Democrats in Congress cowering, I shudder to think about what's next.

You can find a dozen explanations for the Massachusetts vote. Do Americans not like what Obama offers? Did we vote for change but not really want it?

Are Democrats - especially liberals - out of touch with average Americans?

Was Martha Coakley simply the wrong candidate for the Democrats?

If the Brown campaign and victory were all about health care, does the Massachusetts vote mean that for the average American, some things are just too complicated to understand? Too complex to accept?

Was yesterday's vote in Massachusetts, as The Nation's Katrina Vanden Heuvel put it in her column this morning, simply part of "a generalized anti-establishment anger at loose in this country, reinforced by a White House team that has delivered for Wall Street but not enough for hurting communities"?

Certainly the Massachusetts election emphasizes the independence of independent voters, something that both parties ought to be paying attention to.

And it sure seems to me that Obama has to do a better job of showing middle America how his hopes and theirs align.

In his analysis in this morning's New York Times, Adam Nagourney asks whether now Obama will "make further accommodations to Republicans in an effort to move legislation through Congress with more bipartisanship." LOL. More bipartisanship? Despite Obama's efforts, there's been no bipartisanship, about anything. Republican leaders don't want it.

So now what?

As a Coakley defeat began to seem likely over the past few days, some Democrats and commentators complained that Obama should have been focusing on jobs, not health care (as though the two were completely unrelated).

Here, too, though, the task seems nearly impossible. Paul Krugman has been warning for months that the initial stimulus wasn't big enough to create jobs and now, he wrote recently, with the public terrified of government spending, there'll be little support for more.

Brown, writes Adam Nagourney, has "shocked and humiliated the White House."

Shock, maybe. Humiliation? Only if the White House accepts the vote as that.

Maybe, in the end, it's just a lesson for a young president and his sometimes too-cocky aides. Maybe they'll realize that it's well past time to have a good bit less "cool" and a lot more "Harry Truman" and "Bill Clinton."

Maybe, also, there's a lesson for Obama's most liberal supporters, who have attacked him as harshly as the Republicans:

Be careful what you wish for.