The Washington Post on the after-election

What's Next?

Results have been tallied and winners declared. Unlike 2000, Election 2004 was definitive -- at least by the day after. But the outcome also raised a lot of questions, and not just for Democrats. Here are just a few that come to mind:

President Bush said he has a "mandate" and has acquired "political capital" that he intends to spend. What sort of programs and initiatives should we expect to see? Will there be a shift in foreign policy? What does the world think of Bush's reelection?

In the Cabinet, who's who for the second term? Or who will be whom, to be grammatically correct?

What sort of political climate can we expect in Washington as Congress returns? How will net Republican gains in both the House and Senate affect the dynamics on Capitol Hill?

Can the Democrats in the Senate stave off Bush appointees to federal benches, possibly including the U.S. Supreme Court, that they find objectionable?

Answers to such questions and others -- mostly speculative for now -- obviously will be dissected and debated ad infinitum in the pages of The Post and elsewhere. Unfortunately our time and space is limited, and so we offer a sampling of commentary from the post-election Sunday Outlook, where a good deal of ink this week was dedicated to interpreting the 2004 election results:

For Democrats, the self-flagellation following Sen. John F. Kerry's near-miss run at the White House and a net loss of seats in both houses of Congress has given way to self-reflection. Bruce Reed, president of the Democratic Leadership Council, wrote:

"If Democrats want to become a majority party again anytime soon, we'd better look where we're going. We can start by using this loss to look forward, not back. ...

"If we can avoid the circular firing squad that followed past defeats, we will see the deeper, more daunting challenge that awaits us. We ran a good campaign against a bad president, and we still got beat."

In his op-ed column on Sunday, The Post's David S. Broder offered this analysis:

"Sam Rayburn, the great 20th-century Democratic speaker of the House, was noted for a line he used on the more obtuse members of his party who failed to learn the lesson of a political setback. "There's no education in the second kick of a mule," he would say.

"Wise as that advice might have been for individual legislators, the opposite is true when it comes to Mr. Rayburn's party. Democrats begin to learn their lessons only after they have been beaten twice."

An election review by Kate O'Beirne, the Washington editor of the National Review, analyzes what Republicans did right in building a winning coalition:

Republicans find themselves on the majority's side of the cultural divide because they don't display the Democrats' condescension and hostility to the moral sentiments and concerns of most Americans. Bush's deeply held religious faith sometimes finds awkward expression but never seems insincere. His habits of heart and mind mark him as a man of faith.

On the Supreme question, Edward Lazarus, author and former law clerk to Justice Harry A. Blackmun, wrote that as soon as it became clear that Bush was the winner, his friends and colleagues were abuzz, "panicked that George Bush's reelection will result in a radical right-wing takeover of the Supreme Court as Bush makes as many as four new appointments, including a successor for the seriously ill Chief Justice William Rehnquist. Only time will tell, but such fears are likely exaggerated. In the next four years, the court's center of gravity will probably change only modestly, if at all."