Apparently, there was an earthquake on Tuesday night that registered way up there on the Richter scale, an earthquake that was felt all over the country but which affected only the Obama administration and Democratic members of the House and Senate. Since then, these Democrats have been stumbling around, fearful, confused, and pathetically frightened of the shadow of their own key legislative initiative.

The funny thing, of course, is that the earthquake was pretty much scheduled in advance. All the earthquake prediction models had predicted that an earthquake of this magnitude would take place at the precise time that it did occur. And yet our Beltway Democrats proved to be totally unprepared to deal with its aftermath.

Especially the President. As panicked House Democrats watching the healthcare reform movie started to stampede for the exits, he didn’t even try to hold them together to see the movie through to the end. His only purpose seemed to be to see them safely to the exits. All he did, in effect, was to exhort them to walk, not run. And he was talking as wildly as anyone else about starting from scratch, and sitting down once again to forge a new compromise with Republicans in the hope of coming up with a freshly-watered-down version of what we had before:

“I would advise that we try to move quickly to coalesce around those elements in the package that people agree on,” the president says in the ABC News interview.

“We know that we need insurance reform. The health insurance companies are taking advantage of people. We know that we have to have some form of cost containment because if we don’t, then our budgets are going to blow up,” Obama says. “And we know that small businesses are going to need help so that they can provide health insurance for their families. Those are the core, some of the core elements of this bill.”

According to the NYT, Obama knows what he wants, he just has no idea how he wants to go about getting it.

Inside the White House, top aides to the president said Mr. Obama had made no decision on how to proceed, and insisted that his preference was still to win passage of a far-reaching health care measure, like the House and Senate bills, which would extend coverage to more than 30 million people by 2019.

Maybe a return to sanity is still possible. Some of the jelly-wobbling has already stopped. Yesterday evening, Barney Frank started to come out of his earthquake-trauma induced stupor. Maybe other Democratic leaders will follow today? Maybe this will even include President Obama, who will turn out to simply have been tragically misunderstood yesterday?