There's already some rumbling about Brown presidential prospects, and I have to admit, "I'm nobody's senator but yours" in last night's context was absolutely brilliant rhetoric. But he'll be no more qualified than Obama was for office come 2012, and less qualified than Palin.

It looks to me like we're entering a phase of politics which I suppose you could call "the revenge of Burke's little platoons", retail and insurgent politicians rising and stinging the would-be great and powerful, and then returning to the masses from which they came. There are no well-experienced Reagans, no patrician Roosevelts or well-groomed Kennedys in the wings to mount the white horse and lead the march. That will no doubt alarm those who need parades in their life, but then, without the man on a horse, we won't have to face that last parade led by a riderless horse with boots turned backwards in the stirrups, either.

Experts and powers and authorities, this was your call in the night. Hear it, and be humbled. You were made as we all were, sparked from the mud. You will be as we all will be, one with the mud again.