No no, just kidding. She did say that, but naturally the message that voters sent somehow isn’t the message that’s landed in her inbox. As she understands it, the message from last night is, “We’re still too ignorant and/or partisan to understand how great ObamaCare is.” Which fits right in with how she’s spun this boondoggle all along: It’s not the law itself that’s the problem, it’s the fact that Democrats “overpromised” on it. Poor liberals, forever having their ingenious policies tripped up by inept “messaging.”

Good news, though, I guess, for any Missouri voters who meant to signal that their opposition to ObamaCare shouldn’t be taken seriously: Your elected representative has heard you loud and clear.

McCaskill said she understood what Missouri voters had been trying to say about the healthcare reform law for which she had voted in the Senate. But the centrist senator downplayed the vote as a result of heavy Republican primary turnout and a lack of education about the effects of the law.

“I certainly noticed the vote on Prop C, the healthcare law, and: message received,” she said Wednesday in a conference call with state reporters.

“I think there has been … a lot of noise about the mandate that people have gotten so focused on that they don’t realize that there’s going to be more access and affordability and more choices,” she said.

High Republican turnout did contribute to the size of the landslide, but as both Ed and Michael Tanner explained this morning, even a unanimous vote on the GOP side couldn’t have gotten you to 71 percent overall. A lot of indies and Democrats — specifically, Democrats motivated enough to vote in a primary — had to be onboard to push past the supermajority threshold. No wonder Newsweek’s spinning as hard as it is to turn last night into some sort of grand defeat for tea partiers: When you’ve got enough bipartisanship on a core tea-party plank to crack 70 percent in a swing state, you’d better work overtime on the “messaging.”

In fairness to McCaskill, she did mention in passing on today’s conference call that there’s a lot of work to do on “the provisions of the law,” not just in making sure that the benighted doofuses who voted on Proposition C fully understand it. Exit question: Does that mean she’ll join the GOP next term in trying to repeal the mandate? Since, you know, the message has been received and all.