So what happens now?

One of my best friends ever posted a very classy concession a day or two ago on behalf of the Republicans, and the son of a bitch short-circuited my planned post to the effect of “SUCK IT.” As a result, I now have to do something thoughtful on where the GOP goes from here, because it’s starting to look like the Party of Lincoln is going to spend a couple years as the Party of Rethinkin’. 1700-word claptrot follows…

First things first: if you look around the Interwebs, you will see a map showing the percent change in party voting from 2004. Long story short: the only places where McCain outran Bush are the Appalachians and the Deep South. Obama won by flipping a bunch of places outside the Deep South, and flipping them hard. Think about it in terms of sports:

* The only BCS conferences where McCain won a majority are the SEC and the Big 12.

* McCain lost every single state in the Big Ten.

* Incidentally, Red Sox Nation is now represented in the House of Representatives exclusively by Democrats.

Or to put it another way: McCain lost every single state bordering or east of the Mississippi River that doesn’t have a star on the Rebel flag.* That is a huge, huge, huge disadvantage to start from, and coupled with the Pacific coast…well, you can do the math yourself.

Long story short: Kevin Phillips sold the Republican party’s soul to the Devil in the mid-1960s, and now the bill has come due. The GOP has become, first and foremost, a party of the South – and more than that, the white Protestant rural South. Virginia and Florida flipped, North Carolina may yet flip**, and the demographics of all three states suggest that there is not an easy path back for the GOP. The objects of “The Yuppie Handbook” may all have been reliable Reaganauts, but the buffoons of “Stuff White People Like” all have an Obama sticker on their Prius. The cohort of upper-middle-class professionals has flipped to the Democrats, and the Republicans can’t survive in their current form if they lose suburban voters in the same proportions as urban voters.

Obama has put the GOP in a very difficult position: he is selling a liberal agenda with a conservative sensibility. The whole Obama aura – steady, patient, never flying off the handle, cool-calm-collected – is something that makes it difficult to paint him as some wide-eyed naïf running around like a chicken with its head cut off, an image that Steve Schmidt and Rick Davis did nothing to undermine with their stunt-casting approach to running Team McCain. (Believe me when I say that in fifty years, the Davids – Plouffe and Axelrod – will be required reading for studying American campaign politics, and McCain’s Blunder Twins will be held up as the apotheosis of how not to run a national campaign.) There are a lot of voters out there who responded to conservatism not out of any ideological preference, but out of the general feeling that “the adults are in charge.” And if Obama can sustain that sensibility throughout his term, it becomes that much tougher to get over on him unless his Abramowitz numbers*** are in the crapper.

Now, when a party takes an ass-kicking (1964, 1972, 1984), there tends to be a lot of shellshock and “where do we go from here, we are lost” sort of thinking. However, when a party loses a close one, there is a strong temptation to say “if only we’d done this thing or that thing we would have won easily.” Right now, looking at the post-mortems, it looks like the general opinions are:

1) McCain was the wrong candidate because he’s not really a reliable conservative, and Romney or Huckabee should have been the man.

2) Sarah Palin was dumber than hammered snot and cost the GOP enough votes to sink them, and Huckabee or Jindal should have been the VP.

3) Everything was fine and McCain just got boned by the media and would have won if he’d gotten a fair hearing.

4) It was a shitty year for Republicans and nobody could have won, so there’s no reason to burn it all down and start fresh.

5) The old GOP approach is broken and needs to be re-thought from the ground up.

Going through these individually….You can argue about 1) all over the place. McCain 2000 and McCain 2008 were manifestly different candidates, to be sure. But in 2008, McCain and Ron Paul were the only GOP candidates that were offering a significant deviation from the Bush line. Everyone else was running hard to satisfy the base of a President with a 30% approval rating. So from that standpoint, McCain legitimately offered the best opportunity to get separation from a toxic incumbent.

You can also make the case that McCain was unpopular with the base and was only saved by Palin, and that somebody like Tom Ridge would have only resulted in a worse loss. Maybe, maybe not, but most of the exit polling shows that Sarah Palin was the number-one negative consideration in why people opposed the McCain ticket…so maybe 2) has some plausibility. Certainly Huckabee was a lot more charming with the press, and Bobby Jindal offered some options on the “young promising minority candidate” front. The flipside of that, of course, is that they are both on deck for 2012.

Say what you like, but 3) is risible. McCain didn’t win the nomination, it was bestowed on him by Tim Russert and Chris Matthews – how else would somebody who finished 4th in Iowa come into New Hampshire being hailed as the favorite? McCain was the best friend of the press and had his viability sustained by them at a time when his money and resources were completely depleted, and the love and affection only changed after the Palin pick, when – inexplicably – the GOP began flogging the “liberal media” louder and harder than they had for twenty years. McCain alienated his base, all right – the DC press corps. The amount of ink you’re about to see spilled rehabilitating McCain should put the lie to the idea that the press had it in for McCain from the beginning. In fact, I would argue that the reason the press had affection for Obama was because he was the Democrat that emerged as the anybody-but-Hillary candidate, but that’s another post.

Obviously, I agree with 4) based on the Abramowitz model. When the incumbent President has a disapprove number over 70%, you have to think the candidate of his party is going to start off hobbled. Factor in the slumping economy and it’s hard to argue that the GOP never had a prayer, and the only thing that kept it close was Obama’s youth and race and relative inexperience – if the Democrats had offered up the typical New South Governor-type charismatic young whitey, the GOP might have finished the night winning Alaska, Arizona and Utah. As a professional, though, I’d like to think that nothing is ever a lost cause and that it’s still possible to win through in the face of that kind of adversity…again, more on that in another post.

I think, ultimately, that somebody’s going to have to look at 5). Historically, you can sat that the GOP can count on the states McCain won, for the most part, for now. Indiana might come back next time around, but based on the demographic profile (not to mention two Democrats in the Senate and a third as governor), Virginia may well be lost. And if Virginia goes and North Carolina’s going, can Georgia be far behind? Don’t forget, Clinton won it in 1992 and McCain had to defend it this year. West Virginia is still teetering on the brink, and not every Democratic candidate for President is going to be a black Yankee. Colorado and Nevada are in play, possibly for good, and if you buy the old line about “Iowa will go Democrat when Hell goes Methodist,” well, they’re passing out the old Wesleyan songsheets now. In short, the reliable GOP base, the hard core that will be there ’til the last dog dies, is now 100 votes short of what’s needed to win the White House, and the Sun Belt areas that were the key to the “emerging Republican majority” are growing bluer with every passing cycle. Running the old Reagan electoral-lock approach (bear in mind that no GOP challenger has won California without being *from* California in my lifetime) or the Atwater-Rove Southernization model will soon be the equivalent of lining your football team up in the run-and-shoot.

Long story short: it looks grim for the GOP. If they don’t do something to get back a big chunk of the Congress in 2010, things could get ugly fast – and don’t forget, the biggest majority the Gingrich GOP ever had in the House is smaller than the majority the Democrats had before election day 2008. They can sit around and hope that Obama makes a mistake, but if he runs his administration like he ran his campaign, well, sitting around and hoping your opponent screws up is a lousy strategy. Ask Hillary. They can run hard at the base and try to whoop up a groundswell like they did against Clinton in 1992-94, but Obama won with more than 50%, so the idea that you have 60% of the country already inclined to oppose the President? Fool’s hope.

The old way isn’t going to get it done anymore. So what’s the new way? Funny you should ask…but you’ll have to wait ’til next time.

* Trick question – Virginia seceded in 1861, but West Virginia didn’t split from Virginia until 1863. What, you didn’t have the Civil War as the sole organizing principle of history classes in school? Note that those last two stars are for secessionist governments in Kentucky and Missouri, so McCain lost two stars for sure and may yet lose two more depending on the final count.

** The AP is now calling North Carolina for Obama. Personally, I don’t think the Associated Press is legally binding, so I’ma wait for, oh, the ACTUAL BALLOTS. Suck it AP!!

*** Approval rating of incumbent and GDP growth in Q2 of 2012. If approval is below 45% and GDP growth is < 1.5%, Obama’s goose is cooked. If approval rating is over 50% and GDP growth is > 2.5%, the GOP may as well sit it out. In between is where it gets interesting.