From the Baltimore Sun:

President Barack Obama’s top political advisor, David Axelrod, said today that if the White House had been asked earlier, more could have been done for embattled Democratic Senate candidate Martha Coakley in Massachusetts.
Axelrod, in a question and answer session with reporters, said it was too soon for “post-mortems” on the special election to fill the late Sen. Edward M. Kennedy’s seat. And for the record, he said that he still expected Coakley to win.
But it didn’t take much reading between the lines to see that the president and his team are preparing to back-pedal as swiftly as humanly possible to distance Obama from a disastrous result tonight.
The Obama strategist volunteered praise for the Massachusetts Senate campaign run by the Republican, Scott Brown, and seemed to find nothing good to point to in the Democratic effort. He said he didn’t want to “delve deeply into post-mortems on the day people are voting.”
Axelrod appeared to reject the criticism that he and his team had been taken by surprise and should have done more to head off a Democratic collapse. He said it was “not exactly a revelation to us” that voters are angry and anxious after a year in which millions of Americans have lost their jobs and millions more see no evidence in their lives that the economy is recovering.
Axelrod also said that there were “local issues at play” in Massachusetts and that the Republican had run “a very clever campaign.”
“As a practitioner in politics, my hat’s off to him,” Axelrod said.

They appear to have that Creig Deeds feeling in the White House today about Martha Coakley. And so Axelrod was sent to do damage control after all of the president’s truck-driving dismissals Sunday.