The parties are dominated by radicals. Radicals care enough to get involved. But radicalism doesn't win you the Presidency. In a Presidential race, the radicals are a liability.

Although there are more conservatives than liberals in America, the Presidency is not won on an idealogical basis either - the American people are open to Presidents from either party. They do not share the closed mindedness that partisans have.

The American people want a vision for running the country that has a chance of actually working.

Kerry never asserted such a vision - a vote for him was really a vote against George Bush, for a variety of reasons. Obama, on the other hand, inspired a lot of people in his first campaign that he had a different way forward.

The reason Republicans couldn't sell it this time around was that the story was deregulation and low taxes. Its the same story that we'd gotten from the Bush administration, and people know that those policies created the economic mess that we've just lived through. Only partisans are unable to see that.

Romney played up the idea that these four years haven't been that great, so why not try something different, but people weren't buying it. They associate the pain they are currently feeling with the policies Romney is offering to switch to.

I'm not happy about all the talk about demographics that is factoring into the aftermath. Its overtly racist - its the view that America is a country of people of particular colors and sexes and your political views more or less boil down to what color your skin is and what kind of sex organs you have, so if a particular party can just appeal to certain colors and certain organs they can build a coalition that will put them into office.

The Presidency is not won on an idealogical basis, so building coalitions of identity groups is not sufficient. Furthermore, I want a candidate that appeals to what I think rather than who I am.

If Republicans want to be relevant again they either have to come up with a plan that actually makes sense right now, or they have to wait until the plan they have makes sense again.

A stuck clock, is, in fact, right twice a day.

There are times when lower taxes and deregulation are the things that you want. The 1980's were such a time. Every situation is not just like the 1980's. This situation is not anything like the 1980's. The solution that worked in the 1980's will not work now. The solutions that will work now would not have worked then.

If the Republicans could come to the table with a proposal that might actually work now, they would be more relevant, but they can't. They are signed up to rigid agreements not to raise taxes and they are prepared to drive the country off the cliff rather than raise the debt ceiling.

They are too beholden to their solutions to actually think about the problem, and they think the reason Romney lost was because he was too moderate, rather than because he wasn't proposing something that made sense, so they aren't going to start putting the problem before their ideology any time soon.

So the Republican party is our stuck clock, which we are going to put away for now because it isn't telling us the right time. I think it is going to be about another decade before we really need to get that clock out of the closet again. By then it is going to be covered by a lot of dust and it might be hard to get it running. That means the pendulum is probably going to swing too far to the left, because once it gets going in that direction it might be hard to slow it down.

There is a wildcard though. If the Dems make a major national security mistake, the Republicans will be back in again in a heartbeat.