A week into the Obama honeymoon it is debatable who has the bigger headache, the Democrats, who have been celebrating every day like it’s election day, or the Republicans, who have to work out how to rebuild their party. How and how quickly the GOP rebuilds at both the state and federal level will have a profound impact on British politics as the Tories have, to an underappreciated extent, taken to leaning on the Republicans for policy ideas in recent years.
The headline election numbers were bad enough for the Republicans — Obama 365 electoral college votes, McCain 173 — but the details were even worse. The Republicans saw their vote share drop 12 points among Hispanics — the fastest-growing ethnic group in the US, lost the suburbs to the Democrats, and were beaten among first-time voters 68 to 31 per cent when in 2004 they only trailed by seven points among this group. They failed in Indiana, North Carolina and Virginia, states that had been Republican for 40 years. And at the Congressional level, their last Congressman in New England was defeated. The Republicans are now a rump party.
During the final days of the campaign, McCain’s stump speech was all about his biography and the idea that Obama had socialist tendencies. It was a hard sell given that Obama was promoting his plans for tax cuts in a prime-time infomercial on pretty much every network, and it illustrated just how bereft of ideas the Republicans are. That the rally crowds only really got excited by ‘Drill, Baby, Drill’, with its phallic connotations, and Sarah Palin, says a lot about the intellectual state of American conservatism.
The Republicans are down the same hole the Tories were in 1997: out of office, out of ideas, their reputation for competence gone and fighting against the best politician of the generation.
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