it’s all over ‘cept the shouting in Republican circles and I would love to be a fly on the wall for some of those internal debates in coming weeks. Amazingly, Tea Party faithful are already saying that Romney just wasn’t conservative enough for the country (“strictly conservative” having vanished with the Hula Hoop, if not the Etch-a-Sketch, over the months between the primaries and the general election) and standard bearers like Ryan and Rand Paul are being touted as the future of the GOP.

At the risk of being redundant, maybe Obama won because the coalition he put together four years ago was real after all. Sure, the belief some had in him then as a transitional, transcendent figure was tarnished over time — he seemed to spend a lot of the first term just fighting to stay in place. But looking at the faces at the rallies in the last weeks, and those at the victory celebration in Chicago last night, was a good reminder that the Dems are still the party of the young and the non-white — the party of the future, that is.

Our daughter, who was adopted in South America, voted for the first time yesterday, and while she sympathized with my efforts to elect Obama four years ago, the whole thing was a little abstract to her 14-year-old self. Now, with issues like women’s reproductive rights and climate change a little more pressing for this college sophomore, she was all over the returns. She texted us screen grabs or Romney’s Titanic party and Obama’s victory bash and the contrast was clear; one looked like her and her friends, the other looked like… the Lawrence Welk Show.

Oh, sorry. Lawrence Welk is dead. They just keep showing his old shows on television. Kind of like the GOP.