The great political debate in the wake of last week's two gubernatorial elections and a special House election in upstate New York was whether or not they were a referendum on President Obama. The clear and definitive answer is: yes and no.

Votes in two states out of 50 and in one congressional district out of 435 hardly constitute the voice of America singing. On the other hand, the results can't be dismissed altogether.

The election of Republican governors in Virginia and New Jersey, two quite disparate states, certainly confirmed dissatisfaction with the Democratic candidates, and more generally with the economic conditions and high unemployment in both places. The latter understandably could be read as disappointment with the president, for all his considerable efforts at economic recovery.

At the same time, the Democratic takeover of the House seat in New York's North Country in a district long in Republican hands seemed more a commentary on internal chaos in the GOP than any statement one way or the other about Obama.

Conservatives rebelling against the nomination of a moderate Republican who supported abortion rights essentially forced her out of the race in favor of a true-believing Conservative Party nominee. She then endorsed the Democrat, splitting GOP ranks and handing the seat to him.

The resulting clouded crystal ball could, and has been, interpreted whichever way the party leaders gazing into it chose to see the meaning.

Republicans have read the Virginia and New Jersey results as some kind of miraculous resurrection of their party after the depths to which George W. Bush plunged it, and as the puncturing of the Obama phenomenon.

As for the Democrats, they are projecting the New York skirmish as the forerunner of a cataclysmic civil war within the party of Lincoln. They see, and hope for, the new populist protest over activist government seizing the GOP, led by the loud but narrow base marching behind the high heels of Sarah Palin.

But as Mark Twain once said of a false obituary about him, reports of the political demise of the Obama presidency or of either party are premature.

The new president is less than 10 months into his Oval Office tenure, and while suffering slippage in his approval ratings he still commands considerable support as a hands-on leader.

Concerning the Grand Old Party, it has a way historically of rising from the ashes, and quickly. After the disastrous landslide defeat of presidential nominee Barry Goldwater in 1964, it captured the White House only four years later with the election of little-loved Richard Nixon. And after the Watergate fiasco and the 1976 defeat of Gerald Ford, the party was back in the White House in 1980 behind Ronald Reagan.

The Republican leaders in Congress continue to dig in against Obama's ambitious agenda as their chief motivation, and the tea-party chorus continues to warn of galloping socialism. But the main, broader public concern seems to be that he is trying to do too much too fast, rather than focusing on combating high joblessness, just reported to have reached 10.2 percent.

The great sport of reading political tea leaves is a traditional exercise at the time of the first off-year elections after a presidential election.

The fact that only two states choose their governors at this time is a natural if oversimplified and unreliable way to assess a new president's progress, but an irresistible one for the parties and the news media.

The same is also true about special congressional elections, which customarily are very low-turnout events in which voters who regularly will stir themselves from their daily preoccupations to cast a presidential vote every four years seldom bother.

In evaluating the state of play between the two major parties, and the success or failure of a new president, neither these isolated elections nor the ups and downs of the polls will be as revealing as the comfort level of voters with the occupant of the White House and with the conditions of war and the economy when Americans enter the polling booth in November 2012.