Holy crap. I step away from the Internet for five minutes and suddenly Sarah Palin is president. Cripes! I mean, really, are you guys watching these returns tonight? Tea Party “favorite” (of course, we can’t say candidate because the Tea Party is only a party like the Vietnam Conflict was a war — so yes, it is a party, but no, we can’t call it that) Christine O’Donnell has won the right to challenge whatever poor Democrat is taking up the old Biden banner in Delaware, while the New York Republican Party (when did they get one of those?) now has as its gubernatorial standard-bearer some guy named Carl P. Paladino. I mean, I’ve heard of Rick Lazio, at least. (Which is not to imply that I didn’t enjoy Mr. Paladino’s work as the D.A. on “Law & Order for all those years, because — oh, wait, that was another guy? Someone get back to me on this.)

I suppose the people who are really celebrating tonight are Democrats. Andrew Cuomo masterfully cleared the field earlier this year by, uh, OK, it was bad luck and bad choices that took David Paterson out of the picture (same/same for Eliot Spitzer, I guess), and now he finds his famous name going up against a guy who’s been quietly sending checks to most of Republican New York (seriously, who is this? Is he sending checks to the past? Is Michael Bloomberg circa 1998 making a fortune off of this man?) for years. Paladino, whose signs declare New York “Carl Country,” opposes gay marriage, mosques (and one must assume Islamic Community Centers) near Ground Zero, the assault weapons ban, and labor unions.

Likewise, in Delaware, the Biden Family Franchise (formed in Scranton, PA, if you hadn’t heard) must be raising a tea-flavored toast tonight to whomever it was who decided to put a spunky tea-party candidate up against two-term governor Mike Castle. Get this: 538 gave Castle about a 93% chance of winning in a Castle/Coons race. Coons v. O’Donnell, on the other hand, currently gives the Dem an 83% chance of pulling it off.

But hey, I’m a Democrat, so I know what happens next. What masterful plan does the party have to snatch defeat from the gaping, tea-scented jaws of victory? I assume some form of campaigning that puts Cuomo in a tank, releasing prisoners, shouting “woooooooo!,” being advised by Naomi Wolf on his fashion choices, and possibly marrying a ketchup heiress are in store. Or they could just skip the foreplay and go right to twittering a video of him killing kittens. Either way, if it’s now the Democrats’ race to lose I, for one, am confident they can do it.

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