There’s a lot to process in last week’s election results; we’ll begin this week and perhaps continue the analysis in coming weeks. And no this isn’t being scribbled hastily as I wait in line for a standby flight to Down Under. Hashem has spoken after all has made His choice of the marionette whose strings he’ll be tugging over the next several years and all will be well. But even viewed through the visually impaired eyes of This World there’s much reason for good cheer as we’ll discuss.

First to tally some winners and losers. Many in the first group couldn’t actually vote because they don’t live here. I speak of people like Castro and Chavez who endorsed our president before the election; the Communist Chinese rulers who as per a “senior and well-connected source” in their ranks who spoke with the BBC were “relieved” by his reelection because “[w]e know that … when the chips are down we can push Obama around.… in a country that [we] feel is visibly weakening”; Putin who’ll now get to experience just how flexible his American counterpart can be on missile defense and many others.

The losers are obvious. That would be the American people and in the longer view the Republic and the American project on which it is founded. Within that group there are of course greater and lesser losers. The first sub-group includes faith communities which will need to brace for a potential attempt to complete the unprecedented assault on religious liberty that got underway in the first Obama term.

Yet the overall picture is far from gloomy. The US House of Representatives remains solidly in the hands of the loyal opposition and this after vigorously attacking Obama’s entire policy agenda ever since 2010 and daring to not just touch but take hold of the ostensible political poison pill of entitlement program reform. Barack Obama by contrast has prevailed after a campaign that ran largely on attempts to personally tear down a good man not on his non-existent record of achievement or even promises of future achievement.

So if you’re looking for a great model for running a successful reelection campaign Obama’s your guy. Then again he had quite a head start having commenced this back in January 2009 (or was it in November 2008 with his imaginary Office of the President-Elect). But if you’re looking for a referendum on policy in Tuesday’s results look no further than the electorate’s return of a Republican majority to the House. As conservative tax-reform lobbyist Grover Norquist put it: “One party has a plan that has been tested successfully in the fires of an election. The other party cannot even write a budget that wins a single Democrat vote. Onward.”

It’s true that Republican campaigns for the Senate mostly failed miserably with hopes fizzling for taking control of that chamber despite the fact that Democrats were defending many more seats than were Republicans. But in two of those races inMissouriand Indiana the Republican undoing was the result not of unpopular policy stands but of Democrats deviously using a contentious social issue to waylay their opponent and the latter’s obtuseness in failing to see the snare that had been set. Other losses in solidly “red” states likeMontanaandNorth Dakota aren’t as easily explainable but an examination of those contests may show that even the Democrats tacked right and ran against the Obama administration’s record.   

In addition for the first time in 12 years — 30 governorships are Republican as are 26 state legislatures (althoughNew York’s is no longer one of them). On many moral issues as well as much of the implementation of Obamacare control of these levers of state government is crucial. It can also be hoped that many of the more than 30 lawsuits against the health care law will prevail slowing or reversing its march.

There is also cause for optimism in this observation of Stanley Kurtz in a piece at National Review:

$$$highlighttext$$$

[A] resurgent second-term challenge to Obama from populist conservatives is far more likely than it seems. That’s because the president’s first term hasn’t really happened yet….Ordinarily a president enacts various policies in his first term the public test-drives the changes and the president’s re-election campaign is a referendum on those new policies. The difference in Obama’s case is that in order to secure re-election he has backloaded nearly all of his most transformative and controversial changes into a second term.…

Once people actually begin to experience de facto health-care rationing for example they may get even angrier than they were in 2009-2010 when rationing was only a prospect…  And this time the public could be angered not only by the policies but by growing recognition that actual enactment of Obama’s agenda was delayed for political purposes. $$$hilighttext$$$

Kurtz adds that the fact that he is the only president to win reelection despite having lost votes — ten million of them — may not chasten or moderate him. He took the “intentionally risky path of alienating half the country with an in-your-face negative campaign because he believed that demographics now allow him to cobble together a leftist majority in support of transformative change … and so will govern with relative disregard for opposition….” And despite a returning Republican majority in the House the president will likely seek to circumvent their restraints by abusing his executive powers through rule by executive order.

Ultimately Kurtz’s scenario is a foreboding one: “President Obama has won reelection but in a way likely to propel national polarization well beyond its current level…. What’s more he knows it and he’s ready for it. Obama is willing to pay the price of national division for the sake of making the transformative changes he seeks ” — unless enough Americans unify in opposition to those changes.

But perhaps the most positive thing to emerge from an Election Day that was short on positives is that it ensured that come 2016 Barack Obama will not be on the ballot. Had he lost the coming four years of difficult economic times would be the Republicans’ headache and without a shadow of a doubt he’d have been back in 2016 to “clean up Romney’s mess” liked he did for George W. Bush. Instead it will be the Republicans with a good bench of political talent including several up-and-coming minority stars who will be ready to take on an Obama-less Democratic party four years hence.

It is now Mr. Obama who will have the pleasure of four years’ worth of dealing with a series of truly overwhelming domestic and foreign challenges that he is neither competent nor interested in addressing. Second terms are notorious for turning sour on presidents; add to this the growing list of administration scandals that House committees are chomping at the bit to investigate.

And now that Obama’s been reelected perhaps the American public will cease giving him the free pass he’s enjoyed these past four years. Perhaps it will feel that having put the first black in the White House and having allowed him a second chance despite his extreme incompetence it has now unburdened itself of what Shelby Steele would call its perceived guilt for a racist past and will thus decide to actually hold the president accountable. I suppose that to wish for the same on the media’s part is simply a bridge too far.