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The problem with trying to read anything into today's Illinois primaries is that Illinois is Illinois, by which I don't mean that it has a unique political culture (although it does) but that the elections have nothing to do with abstract narratives and everything to do with particular local concerns. From the East Coast, the races may look like tests of various theories about populism, but in truth if the ridiculous Alexi Giannoulias beats out Dan Hoffman for the Democratic senate nomination that will have a lot less to do with Midwestern opinion on the establishment than it will with the fact that Cheryle Jackson, who has as much chance of election as I do, has locked down 20 percent of the vote. Similarly, I've heard no one at all talking about free floating anger, but I've definitely heard about how Todd Stroger put a busboy on the public payroll and how he's been putting ads that look like parking tickets under people's windshield wipers. This isn't to say that you can't learn anything about the national political climate from the primaries, but the utter disregard for specifics you see in that second linked piece is a kind of political sickness. If you find what's actually happening in the provinces (and why) to be irrelevant, you reduce politics to theater, and analysis to criticism. You also miss out on most of what's interesting—note Gail Collins sneering that 'virtually every person running for anything in Illinois seems to be mainly known as the child of somebody else,' in a year where Lisa Madigan passed on senatorial and gubernatorial nominations that would have been hers for the asking!