YES. WE. DID! OBAMA WON!

People power has spoken. The bizarre "rape caucus" of GOP candidates for elective office who made offensive comments regarding rape, abortion and reproduction were handily vanquished. Women turned out in record numbers to cast their votes in response to all of this, but best of all, people, ordinary people like me who make very little money but stay active and involved in politics, prevailed over huge billionaire money that tried to buy an election to install super right wing candidates in offices all over the nation. The biggest victory was the re-election of our wonderful, smart and thoughtful President, Barack Obama, by a landslide, even, 332 electoral votes to 203 for Mitt Romney. The GOP is now in soul searching mode, struggling to figure out what went so wrong and why. Well, the best analogy that I have heard is where someone referred to the GOP as the party of "Mad Men" trying to survive in a "Modern Family" world. That party still seems to be clinging to the ideology of privileged white men who feel threatened by a changing demographic that they can't seem to embrace. They have a reputation as being the party that doesn't much like brown people. They definitely hate gays, they seem to regard women as being people they can chain in chastity belts and force to bear the children of rapists. Their views on women are downright 19th century and they don't seem to be able to catch up to the fact that we are living in a completely different era where the old rules are falling away, the electorate is more liberal and accepts things that they seem to find abhorrent. They cling to extreme views on too many things to be palatable to most voters, and then they scratch their heads and wonder why the voters reject their message.

The GOP was so confident that Mitt Romney was going to win the Presidency that they even had the gall to put up a transitional web site. It went down very quickly, but even when the election was called for Obama, the GOP refused to believe it or concede the election right away. The great state of Ohio (my home state, YAY, OHIO!) was called at 11:18 pm on Election Day, officially putting Obama over the required 270 electoral votes and sealing his re-election. It took nearly 2 hours for Romney to concede and the President did not give his victory speech until close to 2:00 a.m. I stayed awake until the bitter end so I could watch the President's victory speech. The state of Florida remained in play until late today and it finally went for Obama and even THAT took a while for Romney to concede. Karl Rove is still freaking out, wealthy GOP donors are freaking out that billions of their dollars bought them.......nothing, and the entire GOP is in blame and finger pointing mode. They're busy beginning to fight a civil war over which direction their party will go and it may well mean that if they can't move into the 21st century and quit trying to push the electorate back 60-100 years into the past, that party will end up on the ash heap of history, perhaps even replaced by the Liberty Party or the TEA Party or some other offshoot of the GOP. Either way, they need to figure out who they are as a party. They do have some promising young up and coming minority leaders like Governor Bobby Jindal of Louisiana, Senator Marco Rubio of Florida, Senator Ted Cruz of Texas and Governor Nikki Haley of South Carolina. Two are Latinos and two are Indian-Americans. Two are Governors, two are Senators. If the GOP wants to stop being the party of the slowly shrinking middle aged, church going white male, and if they embrace these young minority leaders as their future, they may well stand a chance. If not......that party will continue to die out and become a dinosaur. They need to stop turning off women voters as well. Stop talking about controlling our lady parts. We are smart enough to make our own health care decisions, thank you. Stop being so right wing hard line. You're turning off a huge swath of potential voters. Be a Big Tent party that welcomes ideas instead of insisting on absolute devotion to a narrow orthodoxy. Stop punishing moderates by pushing them out of your party and into the opposition's camp. Above all, listen to the American electorate. We sent you a LOUD message on this Election Day. Did you hear us, GOP? 

And, OK, allow me to gloat for just a bit: YES WE DID! WE RE-ELECTED PRESIDENT OBAMA! WAY TO GO, OHIO, FOR KEEPING THE WHITE HOUSE IN DEMOCRATIC HANDS!