Third: The Way Forward for the Republicans

As Republicans we have clearly fallen short.  Not only were Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan not elected, but Republican candidates lost up and down the ballot from all wings of the party.  From the socially conservative Indiana and Missouri Senate candidates, to Mia Love of Utah who surely must have a bright future in Utah and potentially national politics.  

There is a case to be made that Romney-Ryan could have won Tuesday night had our turnout operation been better.  The margins of victory in Florida, Virginia, and Ohio were all well within the ground-game-range (3 points).  There are multiple media accounts of our turn-out attempts and turn-out results which I will not comment on here.  And so there is a legitimate possibility that we lost a tactical battle and not the ideological war.  

But you can also see that late-deciding independents broke for President Obama, and there simply are not enough old white men to sustain the GOP in its current form.  

I am personally offended when people paint the Republican party as anti-women, anti-minority, anti-gay, etc.  We sincerely believe that the principles of limited government, free enterprise, personal responsibility, and a strong military will help all Americans better than more government programs,  and economic stimuli.  

As Republicans, we need to modernize on a few issues and better communicate our beliefs and our results on the vast majority of our key platforms.  We don't need to shut-down.  Not when a majority of Americans thing government is too big, or when they think we're headed in the wrong direction.  We need better messaging, better relations with the media, and better ground game operations.  

America needs a credible Republican party just as much as it needs a President Obama to make real accomplishments in the next 4 years.  Let's get to work.  

Second: The Two Paths for Obama

The similarities between President Bush's re-election and President Obama's are notable: relatively unpopular presidents dealing a country that feels it is drifting off course and in the wrong direction.  Both managed to re-energize and turn out their base, much to the chagrin and incredulity of the opposing side.  Both were disliked by the opposition to the point that loathing might not be too strong a word.

We know what President Bush did.  He felt he had earned a mandate, and decided to push ahead with programs and policies he felt he could expend his 'political capital' on.  That combined with the draggings on of wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and an eventual financial collapse contributed to abysmal approval ratings by the time he left office and a reputation today that one of the few bipartisanly held opinions in the country.

Wednesday morning, while trying to search for a way to feel positive about a second Obama term, and to determine why our nation had decided he would make a better President than Mitt Romney, I came to the following conclusion: America, ever an optimistic nation, has decided to give hope another chance.  While I do not agree with the conclusion that President Obama offers a brighter future for us, and I do not understand how we as a nation could had arrived at that decision with so much record and rhetoric to the contrary, I do sincerely hope that President Obama will be able to leads us in a positive direction.

And so I hope he learns from from the mistakes of President Bush.  As Mitt Romney was so fond of saying, we face enormous challenges as a nation.  Our deficits and debt, a stagnant economy, threats from abroad - our course in the 21st century will be heavily impacted by the decisions we make over the next decade, and especially the next four years.  My view is that President Obama was given another chance at hope - to be the President he told us he would be in 2008.  That candidate was not a left wing ideologue, he was unifying figure for a bruised and battered nation.  Four years later our still hurting nation is just as in need of a hero - President Obama, be that hero.

So many crucial decisions await us as a nation, we really cannot afford partisan bickering over the next four years.  That does not mean either party can or should abandon its principles - but it does mean we should have an honest and open dialogue that leads to honest and durable solutions.

That President Obama can be that leader, one I do not believe he has been, is my sincere hope and prayer.        

First: Romney and the Campaign

(this one is going to be a little upset, positive update coming next)

As it became apparent Tuesday night that we had lost the election, I struggled to make sense of it.  I had gone into Tuesday with such high hopes and a good deal of confidence.  That it all evaporated in just a couple of hours, was almost as depressing as the result itself.  As I read through tweets news articles, and Facebook updates, one by my friend Matt Whitlock stood out: "This has nothing to do with Mitt Romney not being good enough. It has everything to do with us not being good enough for him. #Romney2012" and I agree with that wholeheartedly.  Mitt Romney is by far the singularly most qualified person to pursue the Presidency, ever.  If you dispute that, you and I have an extremely different view of what it takes to be a President.  [Foreign policy experience aside, which we generally have not demanded of our candidates in modern American politics].  I have supported Mitt Romney since 2007 when he first began running for President because no one else has such a real record of accomplishments in a such a wide variety of fields.  I want my candidates to be smart, articulate, and committed to results above all.  I do believe being rhetorically inspring is an integral part of a successful President, but inspiring rhetoric is not enough when not backed up with results.  Given a choice between the two, I will chose competency over rhetoric every time.

The post-mortems have begun (as there always will be, and always should be). What worries me are the "Mitt Romney wasn't conservative enough" people.  If you sincerely believe Michelle Bachmann or Herman Cain would have been a more successful Presidential candidates against President Obama, I don't know what to say.  While their (and other's like them) convictions of conservatism may be laudable, their campaigns and their potential as a President were not.

I believe Romney is a right-of-center pragmatist - not a closet moderate, not an ideologue   I believe that's what he's been his entire life and his entire political career.  And I believe that's what this country needs right now. Why he or his team was unable to communicate that, I don't know.  He has not been a flip-flopper or lacking in a political core.  At least not in any way more significant than any other political figure.  If you dispute that, I have a President-elect Obama to sell you who supports a single-payer health care system, has halved the deficit, closed Guantanamo, and doesn't suport same sex marriage.  Politics is tough, and a lot of it is messaging, but Mitt Romney is not some soulless political chameleon, le't s be real folks.

Along those lines,  Mitt Romney does not hate women, or minorities, or poor people, or gays.  He was not a ruthless corporate raider.  Besides being the most competent and qualified person to run for President in modern history, he was by all accounts the most generous.  Countless stories of private personal acts of charity and kindness dot Mitt Romney's life.  By biggest fear and worry was that, had he been elected, his ability to govern would have been hampered by the fact that half of the country thought that he was out to get them - as promulgated by millions of dollars of TV ads.  Whether America rejected Mitt Romney because we viewed him as an unacceptable potential President, or because we rejected his economic and foreign policy plans.  That is indeed the biggest tragedy of this election.  

Anybody who has watched the closing month of the campaign should have been able to see a Mitt Romney the way I've seen him.  While I feel that he could have done a better job of a being a more 3-dimensional candidate by explaining where he comes from and why he is who he is today - in the end we should be voting for a President  not a celebrity or a storybook character.

I had so hoped that Romney would have had the chance to be an amazing President, and I sincerely believe he would have been.  Rarely has a candidate been so prepared for so critical a moment.  But America has chosen a different path.  We will never know what a Romney presidency would have actually been like.