For conservatives casting about for comfort, there are plenty of plausible reasons to dismiss talk of a crisis. Mitt Romney could have run a better campaign. He reacted slowly when Ba-rack Obama defined him as a heartless plutocrat, and flip-flopped on policies so frequently that even campaign allies struggled to keep up. This was an election that maintained the balance of powers as they were, not a rout: if 65m American voters saw fit to hand Mr Obama a second term, fully 62m would have preferred not to sample Hope and Change, the sequel.
展开▼
