Ben Adler | The Nation

While many conservative pundits are coming up with explanations for the election results that excuse them from having to make any ideological adjustments to win future elections, some are claiming that they can easily solve their problems. According to the most partisan members of Republican establishment, the GOP has a racial demographic problem, but all they need to do to solve it is to moderate their stance on immigration. Sharper conservative minds, however, recognize that women, young people and minorities have economic and ideological reasons for voting Democratic.

The most egregious and condescending example of the former line of thinking comes from Charles Krauthammer. In his Washington Post column last Thursday, Krauthammer wrote, “They lose and immediately the chorus begins. Republicans must change or die. A rump party of white America, it must adapt to evolving demographics or forever be the minority. The only part of this that is even partially true regards Hispanics.”

Implicit in Krauthammer’s column is the assumption that African-Americans cannot be persuaded to vote Republican, but that Republicans can win without them. That may be so, although he offers no statistical data to prove it. Nor does Krauthammer prove that Latinos are a much more persuadable group for the GOP.

In the wake of President Obama’s decisive re-election victory on Tuesday, the more intellectually serious members of the conservative commentariat are in post-mortem mode. They are asking what went wrong and how they can avoid a third consecutive loss in 2016. Unfortunately for them, they display only a limited understanding of the Republican Party’s problem, and virtually no understanding of its underlying cause or its solution.

On Fox News Tuesday night former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee, showed that he understands why they lost. “I think Republicans have done a pathetic job of reaching out to people of color, something we’ve gotta work on.” But, as is the case with all his co-partisans, Huckabee assumes it’s purely question of outreach, rather than those voters making a perfectly well-informed decision based on the GOP’s platform. “It’s a group of people that frankly should be with us based on the real policy of conservativism [sic]. But Republicans have acted as if they can’t get the vote, so they don’t try. And the result is they don’t get the vote.”

The primary impulse among conservative pundits seems to be blaming the poor quality of their candidates. For those who are on the insurgent right, such as Red State’s Erick Erickson, that means complaining about Mitt Romney but not the extremist ideologues who lost winnable Senate races, such as Todd Akin in Missouri and Richard Mourdock in Indiana. For Beltway insiders, such as The Weekly Standard’s Fred Barnes and the Daily Caller’s Tucker Carlson, that means complaining about Senate candidates and Romney’s clownish opponents in the Republican primaries.

Washington, DC—The mood at the office of FreedomWorks—a cavern of white walls and working stations across the street from Union Station—is optimistic but nervous rather than ebullient. Preppy young white staffers and their friends mill around sipping expensive beers, switching between chatting about politics and refreshing web pages with the latest update from Florida. Cheers occasionally erupt, but it is misleading: a show for live TV broadcasts from the conference room, not reactions to actual results.

FreedomWorks is a fiscally conservative advocacy organization that rode the Tea Party wave to prominence in 2010. Its chairman is former House Majority Leader Dick Armey, but it is actually run day to day by President and CEO Matt Kibbe.

Although they have an affiliated Super PAC, they do not raise massive sums from eccentric billionaires to buy television advertisements. Rather, they deploy their staffers to states and districts where their favored candidates a handful of the most conservative House and Senate candidates are running.

Fairfax, Virginia—Mitt Romney had a busy day on Monday. He started with an event in Florida, flew up to Virginia for several campaign stops around the state, then out to Ohio and up to New Hampshire to finish off the evening with a campaign rally featuring a performance by Kid Rock. At least he had some enthusiastic crowds to keep his energy high. Romney’s final Virginia campaign stop was held in George Mason University’s basketball arena in this far suburb of Washington, DC. The venue, according a Romney campaign official, took in 7,000 boisterous Romney supporters, while an estimated 10,000 more were left out in the cold. Many of them stayed outside to listen to Romney’s speech over loudspeakers, and to create a horrific traffic jam for journalists departing in cabs with rapidly rising meters.

Romney’s campaign strategy—which has managed to make a deeply uncharismatic candidate roughly tied with President Obama in the national polls on eve of Election Day—was perfectly encapsulated in this event and its crowd. It brought together the angry Republican base, with red meat subtly fed to them by surrogates, while Romney played the aspiring healer-in-chief to reach out to the proverbial soccer moms.

Among the cars on the way out was a pick-up truck with a handmade sign that read, “I vote USA born person 4 president. Nobama.” For such a nativist, the author’s command of English leaves much to be desired. The car in front of that truck had a sign in the window urging passersby, with relative subtlety, to “Vote for America.”