It is too late and I am too tired to write a lengthy piece, but let me just leave you with a few thoughts from the election tonight:

1) The key thing that jumped out at me in exit polls was the 65-70% of Hispanics that voted for Obama.

While hispanics make up only 15% of the national electorate, that number is growing and fast.  In certain states which were key tonight, the % is much higher (NV, NM, AZ, FL and CA).

Any strategy the Republicans formulate for remaining a player in national elections going forward must contemplate both the overwhelming support Hispanics gave to Obama and the growing strength of that demographic group.

I call on the Republican Party to recruit and develop Hispanic candidates for the House of Representatives and the Senate in Texas, Arizona, New Mexico, Florida and California.  The Republican Party has the potential to do very well with Hispanics, but it has been so enslaved to the neo-con, NRA, far right of the party that it risks making the party a rump of angry old white folks.

One of the long term benefits of developing Hispanic candidates and making a concerted effort to reach out to Hispanics is that the Republicans eventually might put California back “in play” (not any time soon mind you, but 8 to 12 years out).

2) The Republican’s will hold on to enough Senate seats that, if it needs to – I mean really needs to, it can impede a radical agenda.  While I think some in congress will want to jam through all kinds of proposals which would be terribly disruptive to a fragile economy and represent long term major structural change to the nation – I think Obama recognizes the key failure of the first two years of the Clinton administration: reaching for too much, too fast in a way that created the backlash that led to Newt Gingrich and the “Contract with America”.  Keeping this in mind, my advice is that Republicans should resist the temptation to try to thwart everything the Democrats want to do and look for ways to work with them.

Without question there are some things which need to be tackled.  My top two are: fixing regulation of the financial system and health care.  I think that both parties will be in relative alignment – with only degrees of difference – on the financial system.  With respect to health care I think there will be wider difference.

I think that instead of trying to thwart altogether the type of health care reform the Democrats will want to push through, the Republicans should try to shape the policy to provide a base of health care coverage while reducing the aggregate amount spent by this nation on health care and keeping the incentive structure of the free market working to continue to promote the advancements in technology which this nations health care industry and the free market have created.

The next two years will be interesting.  Let’s see what Obama is really made of.