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[Reuters]

Nate Silver was right. His ideological antagonists were wrong. And that's just the beginning of the right's self-created information disadvantage.

Before rank-and-file conservatives ask, "What went wrong?", they should ask themselves a question every bit as important: "Why were we the last to realize that things were going wrong for us?"

Barack Obama just trounced a Republican opponent for the second time. But unlike four years ago, when most conservatives saw it coming, Tuesday's result was, for them, an unpleasant surprise. So many on the right had predicted a Mitt Romney victory, or even a blowout -- Dick Morris, George Will, and Michael Barone all predicted the GOP would break 300 electoral votes. Joe Scarborough scoffed at the notion that the election was anything other than a toss-up. Peggy Noonan insisted that those predicting an Obama victory were ignoring the world around them. Even Karl Rove, supposed political genius, missed the bulls-eye. These voices drove the coverage on Fox News, talk radio, the Drudge Report, and conservative blogs. 

Photograph by Matthew Cavanaugh/Getty.

For a guy who insists, no doubt sincerely, that he isn’t a politician and doesn’t need the elixir of victory, Mitt Romney has spent a lot of his life running for office. It’s been almost twenty years since he challenged Ted Kennedy in a Massachusetts Senate race. That campaign, his direction of the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City, and his one term as governor of Massachusetts in the early aughts were all planned and executed at a more than local level of ambition, with the idea of positioning him for bigger things—and within two or three years of taking office in Massachusetts, Romney was running for President, through two endlessly long election cycles. And now it’s over.

President Barack Obama, Vice President Joe Biden, Jill Biden, and First Lady Michelle acknowledge supporters on election night in Chicago on Nov. 6, 2012. (Jewel Samad, AFP / Getty Images)

Barack Obama’s victory was more than a defeat of Mitt Romney. Obama also vanquished prejudice, winner-take-all economics, and attacks on the safety net. The winner is 21st-century America.

On Election Day, Barack Obama was home in Chicago on his way back to the White House—and the Romney campaign was R.I.P., lurching its last ditch way back to Pennsylvania and Ohio. As the results rolled in, the ballroom in Boston descended into despair and the crowd in McCormick Place roared as the states were called and reelection was secured. But something more happened yesterday than in most presidential contests. Myths were confounded, lies proved unavailing, and there were big losers beyond Mitt Romney.

Romney, su esposa junto a Ryan y su mujer, en Boston. / CJ GUNTHER (EFE)

Barack Obama consiguió frenar el avance de las tropas republicanas cuando éstas, tras dos años de una frenética ofensiva, estaban ya a punto de tomar el castillo. Ahora, no solo replegado, sino en desbandada, sin jefe ni estrategia para un contraataque, el ejército conservador retira a sus cadáveres y trata de sanar a sus heridos en este Waterloo del 6 de noviembre.

President Obama

Romney's was, I thought, one of the most graceful and gracious concession speeches I can recall. I thought for a split-second: what if this Romney had run? And then I realized that his party would never have nominated that Romney and his ambition had trumped his integrity long ago anyway. But there was still a poignancy to that moment - the gap between what a human being can be (or still is, as a father or husband or friend) and what politics and wealth and power can do to someone.

The president's oration was almost a summation of his core belief: that against the odds, human beings can actually better ourselves, morally, ethically, materially, and we can do so more powerfully together than alone, and that nowhere exemplifies that endeavor more than America. It was Lincolnian in its cadences, and in some ways, was the final, impassioned, heart-felt rebuke to all those, including his opponent, who tried to portray him as somehow un-American. How deeply that must have cut. How emphatically did he rebut the charge.