WITH a shrug of his shoulders, a Sunday school teacher in the crowd at what was to have been John McCain's victory rally in Phoenix struggled for the words to voice his disappointment.
"The world won't end tomorrow. We're good citizens and we need to support our government," said Don Baker after watching Barack Obama's march to the White House.
As Mr Baker predicted, the sun did rise in the United States yesterday, heralding a new dawn for the Democratic Party that has occupied the Oval Office for only eight years in the last 27.
But it failed to lift the gloom that had descended on the Republican Party. It marked the beginning of a period of recrimination and soul-searching, as the party's leaders combed the ruins of an election campaign that went so badly wrong.
"The Republican campaign started off substantially behind because of the conditions the election was held in," said William Claggett, a professor of political science at Florida State University.
"Large chunks of the population see an economy that's imploding, they feel saddled with an unpopular president and, after eight years, some portion of the electorate just wanted change.
"But the Republicans seemed to lack a consistent message. They'd try one topic one day, another topic the next. To win an election, you need to have some kind of coherent structure to repeat the message over and over, and they only seemed to find that in the last two weeks."
A centrepiece of Mr McCain's campaign was to play up his quarter-century as a congressman and senator for Arizona, and try to highlight Mr Obama's inexperience as a political leader and exploit areas where he appeared weak. It was a tactic that proved successful four years earlier when Karl Rove, George Bush's strategist-in-chief, masterminded the discrediting of the Democratic Party's candidate, John Kerry.
But Mr McCain's efforts were to backfire spectacularly. He accused Mr Obama of being out of touch and attacked his credentials for handling foreign policy and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan at a time when voters' minds were fixed on job losses, house repossessions and the ailing economy at home.
In one speech, Mr McCain, 72, said he believed "the fundamentals of America's economy are still very strong", a statement he later tried to downplay. Prof Claggett said: "It was part of a number of things that suggested it was McCain who was out of touch with the economy and how it was affecting average individuals.
"It provided a message that Obama could use successfully in media ads and suggested that McCain didn't have the competence to handle the economy."
Questions will also be asked over Mr McCain's choice of Sarah Palin, the governor of Alaska, to be his running-mate.
The Republican hierarchy had hoped she would attract the votes of supporters of Hillary Clinton disenchanted with the Democrats. But Mrs Palin's political shortcomings were exposed in disastrous interviews, and she became almost a comedic sidebar to the main campaign after she was lampooned by the actress Tina Fey on Saturday Night Live, the country's foremost satirical show.
While hard-line Republican support held up in the South, two big demographic shifts occurred to give victory to Mr Obama. Ethnic minorities, including millions of Hispanics, turned out in force, tilting traditionally Republican states, such as Florida. And in the north-east, white, college-educated voters, who were a staple of Mr Bush's support, saw the Democrats as their best bet.
As the post-mortem begins, analysts say there is evidence that voters were switching off to Republican strategy.
"Turning the executive branch into a political arm of the Republican Party, stoking fear and division amid the electorate, trashing opponents without mercy, and casting national security as a wedge issue: all these tactics had short-term benefits, and indeed won Bush a second term," said Dan Froomkin, a Washington Post political columnist.
"Ultimately, they seem to have lost America."
Palin hints at bid for presidency in 2012RHIANNON EDWARD SARAH Palin hinted she would emerge from the ashes of John McCain's campaign as a potential leader of the Republican Party.
"I'm not doing this for naught," she told ABC News as the 2008 election entered its final week.
Despite her much-mocked candidacy, she will be seen as one of the party's leaders and a potential presidential candidate for 2012.
Drawing much larger crowds than Mr McCain on the campaign trail, the 44-year-old mother of five has been a polarising figure and will be central to any post-mortem examination of Mr McCain's second White House bid.
She invigorated the party's Christian conservative base, a key voting bloc Mr McCain struggled to tame, and was hailed as a bold "breath of fresh air" for the Republicans, frequently drawing more than 10,000 people at rallies across the country.
Her folksy charm and straight talking appealed to many Republicans, but she will also be criticised as a risky, inexperienced diva who cost Mr McCain the presidency.
Aides yesterday said she was more interested in "positioning herself for her own future" than in winning.
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• Black history: from slave plantation to president
• Quarantine over for 'foot-in-mouth' Joe
• The speech in full: Yes we can … the three little words that inspired a nation
• Michelle Obama: First among equals
The full article contains 938 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
