• Over at the Daily Dish, Andrew Sullivan compiles diverse election reactions from around the web, here and here. He also has some final thoughts on the pain in Maine after last night’s disappointing result. It wasn’t all bad news for the gays, though. “Everything-but-marriage” domestic partnerships survived a referendum in Washington state, and Chapel Hill—yes, the one in North Carolina, really!—elected a gay mayor.

• Alex Pareene has characteristically sensible and witty takes on yesterday’s elections, Maine, and Michael Bloomberg at Gawker.

• At the New Republic, Jonathan Chait dissects the national spin and Michael Crowley articulates what ought to become the conventional wisdom on Mayor Mike: “I’m glad Bloomberg got some comeuppance, but I’m also glad he won.”

• Brian Beutler makes a meaningful point about the elections and health insurance reform: a bill will now be easier to pass in the House.

• Reactions at NRO’s The Corner are predictably smug and self-serving. Jonah Goldberg thinks yesterday was a “very, very bad day for Democrats.” We’ll see. Mark Steyn tries to downplay Hoffman’s loss in NY-23. (Would shoulda coulda!) Never mind, of course, that the Dems actually picked up a seat in the House overall. And finally, slimy Maggie Gallagher is “so happy” about the conservative victory in Maine. (Too bad it didn’t go her way in Washington!)

In actual news, today is the 30th anniversary of the start of the Tehran hostage crisis, and protests there continue for various reasons.

Now, I don’t really care about achingly dull Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty, who was being interviewed by Newsmax (yet another cauldron of empty rhetoric in the conservative echo chamber). What does interest me is his formulation: Obama as a “movement liberal.”

What on Earth is a “movement liberal?”

You often hear about the conservative movement: Buckley to Goldwater to Reagan to Gingrich to Rove’s “permanent majority”—the wilderness of today. Throw in National Review, CPAC and the Heritage Foundation for good measure. But “movement liberal” is a strange phrase. It’s long been an irony of American politics that conservatism, philosophically inclined toward self-reliance, individualism and the preeminence of the free market, has been organized into a cohesive movement while liberalism, based strongly on a belief in collective action, has catered to a varied and often contradictory collection of interests. To read “movement liberal” is therefore startling—the incoherence of what falls under the banner of liberalism in America ought to make such a thing impossible.

So is the phrase empty—is Pawlenty merely going for the rhetorical point? Or does such a thing as a “liberal movement” exist today?

The latest Gallup poll on ideological leanings suggests not. Conservatives continue to outnumber liberals 2:1, as they have, historically, as long as such polls have been conducted. What’s important here is that this poll represents how Americans describe their own political views. Only 20% identify as liberals; can a fifth of the populace a movement make?

I find myself in the unprecedented position of agreeing with Jonah Goldberg, who writes

The Democratic party’s leaders are a lot more liberal than their voters (the dynamic is even more true when it comes to committee chairs who are to the left of the average Democratic congressmen). The Democrats came into power in 2008 thinking they had a huge mandate for liberalism, when they really had a huge mandate for competence (for want of a better word).

The idea that a liberal movement, especially the shadow liberal movement that Pawlenty seems to be hinting at, exists in America in any real form seems ludicrous to me. But it begs a more interesting question.

Should there be a liberal movement?