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Before the votes were cast, Tuesday's midterm elections were looking like a "Seinfeld" election. Like the quirky TV comedy show, the midterms didn't seem to be about anything in particular.

Then the votes were counted and the "Seinfeld" midterms suddenly turned into a "wave" election.

Suddenly this election was about something after all. Mostly it was about somebody who was not explicitly on the ballot yet still loomed large on everybody's minds: President Barack Obama.

Fifty-four percent of those casting ballots in the midterms were dissatisfied with President Obama's job performance, according to exit polls conducted by AP and the networks.

Yet about the same number of voters didn't think much of congressional Republicans either: 59 percent said they were not happy with GOP congressional leaders--and a commanding 79 percent turned thumbs-down on Congress as a whole.

Obama got the message and sent a few of his own. "To everyone who voted, I want you to know that I hear you," the president said the next-day in a news conference. "To the two-thirds of voters who chose not to participate in the process yesterday, I hear you, too."

That sounded like a subtle poke at the Obama voters who failed to show up this time to pull Democratic chestnuts out of the conservative fires as they did in 2012.

It also sounded like a my-mandate-is-bigger-than-yours reminder to the Grand Old Party. The GOP won both houses of Congress. Now it must show it can govern.

In that pursuit, I would suggest, first and foremost, that they don't let their recent victory go to their heads. Majorities can quickly shrink for parties that lose touch with the public mood and forget the job that voters elected them to perform.

Self-styled House Republican "revolutionaries" under Speaker Newt Gingrich found that out after their wave election of 1994 led to back-to-back government shutdowns and the Clinton impeachment, among other fiascos.

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