Well, President Obama won re-election, more or less as expected and as the polls predicted. No doubt there will be months of analysis and Monday-morning quarterbacking and self-examination among the Republicans, but here is what I take away from the election on the morning after:
- President Obama was highly vulnerable, given the unpopularity of Obamacare and the lackluster economic recovery. The fact that the Republicans couldn't unseat him despite these handicaps tells us that the Republicans played a very, very weak hand in this game.
- If the original, moderate Romney had run, he might well have won. The fact that he had to shift so far to the right to win the Republican primaries and keep the Tea Party and religious right base probably doomed his campaign right from the start and lost him much of the independent vote that might otherwise have helped him win.
- What Republicans ought to take away from this (but probably won't) is that this is a moderate country, and extreme political positions, left or right, simply can't garner enough votes to win. There simply aren't enough evangelical Christians and Tea Party stalwarts and white working class men to make a winning coalition out of that combination. They need to move the party back toward the political center and attract more independents, women, Latinos and Asians or they will soon become irrelevant.
Will the Republicans be smart enough to see this? I don't know. If they are smart enough to see this, can they reshape their party in the face of extreme right ideologues and committed Evangelicals? I doubt it.
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