With President Obama's victory over Mitt Romney, many pundits are already engaging in clichéd talk of "soul-searching" for the GOP. What they mean by this phrase differs depending on who says it: Pundits on the left as well as moderate, reform-oriented Republicans are claiming the party needs to move back to a pragmatist set of policies; tea partiers and others on the right, talk radio, and Fox News are claiming that Mitt Romney, like John McCain before him, was simply too moderate to win, and that only a true, principled conservative can lead the charge to victory.

But what Republicans really need to learn from Romney's defeat is not that their candidate was too weak or too moderate. They need to learn that their candidate was forced to adopt far more extreme policies than he previously held due to a primary process that enslaves pragmatism and electability to a rigid ideology. And at the heart of this rigid ideology is a conservative movement that's become the creature of the right-wing media.

Fox News is often described as little more than a mouthpiece for the Republican Party. Nothing could be further from the truth. If anything, the reverse is the case, with the Republican Party serving as unwitting puppets of the self-serving right-wing controversy machine. Fox News and the talk radio shock jocks across the country win whether or not conservatives are in power; these purveyors of political entertainment thrive under a Democratic president, perhaps even more so than under their preferred candidates. There's big money in controversy, and controversy is what the Glenn Becks of the world do best.

At some point, Republicans will need to wake up to the current state of affairs and realize they're being held hostage to a powerful, self-sustaining entertainment industry and that the interests of the party and the interests of Fox News are not one and the same.

Indeed, the spinoffs of this conservative movement/media behemoth can be seen far and wide as bloggers like Dean Chambers take up the mantle of "true conservatism" and begin telling Republicans only what they want to hear—even if that means twisting the polling data beyond anything remotely recognizable as the truth.

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Last month, we took a look at 23 ballot measures worth watching in yesterday's election, from same-sex marriage and marijuana legalization to a voter ID amendment and anti-Obamacare initiatives. Here's a look at how those, and a few others, fared last night:

Same-sex marriage
For the first time ever, voters legalized same-sex marriage at the ballot box in Maryland, Maine, and Washington, as MoJo's Kate Sheppard and Adam Serwer report. The night was a huge loss for antigay groups led by the National Organization for Marriage, which also saw a ballot measure in Minnesota for a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage go down in flames.

Pot legalization
As Josh Harkinson reports, Colorado became the first state to legalize marijuana outright last night, followed an hour later by Washington. The question now is how far the federal government will go to crack down on the historic new laws. Another legalization measure in Oregon failed, in large part due to concerns that the law would have been overly broad. Meanwhile, voters legalized medical marijuana in Massachusetts but rejected it in Arkansas, and in Montana approved a measure that tightens restrictions on the state's existing medical marijuana laws.

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The race in California's 36th congressional district shouldn't have been close. Republican Rep. Mary Bono Mack hung onto the seat for six terms (after gaining it in a special election when her husband Sonny Bono, who had previously held the seat, died). Her Democratic opponent, emergency room physician Raul Ruiz, is a political neophyte; plus he was recently confronted with a politically unsavory bit of his past: a tape of him reading a letter of support of Leonard Peltier, a Native American convicted of murdering two FBI agents in 1977.

But Ruiz won, by three percentage points, after counting went into overtime last night and today.

The district, which includes Riverside County and Coachella Valley, was reconfigured this year and now officially has more Democrats than Republicans. Almost half of the district's residents, and about a quarter of its voters, are Hispanic. Apparently these folks were not fond of Bono Mack's Romney-ish positions and style.

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President Barack Obama greets the crowd at his election-night headquarters with his family. Brian Cassella/MCT/Zuma

On Tuesday night, a country that once sold black people as property elected a black man to its highest office for a second time. Twice now, Virginia, the seat of the old Confederacy, has given its electoral votes to America's first black president. Although Barack Obama's presidency has often departed from the best moral instincts of American liberalism, from his dismal record on clemency to his stewardship of an unaccountable national security state, the fact of his presidency represents a triumph of American liberalism's ability to push the boundaries of what is possible. 

Liberalism's triumph in the 2012 election goes far beyond the reelection of the first black president of the United States:

• When the next Senate is sworn in, it will include Wisconsin's Tammy Baldwin, the first openly gay member of America's upper house.
• Colorado and Washington voted to legalize marijuana for recreational use, setting up an inevitable conflict between the federal government's immoral war on drugs and an American electorate that is growing increasingly weary of it.
• California voters declined to reject the death penalty, but they voted to raise taxes and limit the state's draconian "three strikes" law, which mandated automatic life imprisonment for individuals convicted of three felonies.
• Marriage equality supporters notched wins in four states, for the first time winning at the ballot box instead of in the courts or state legislatures.
• Maryland voters approved in-state tuition discounts for undocumented immigrants brought to the US as children.
• Senate candidates Todd Akin and Richard Mourdock, the most regressive symbols of the Republican agenda on women's rights, were defeated. 

The emerging Democratic majority, as Ruy Teixera once put it, seems to have emerged. But Obama owes that coalition, to an incredible degree, to the decision of Republicans to alienate every significant minority in the country.

Blind to their own identity politics, Republicans dismissed the concerns of gays and lesbians, and women and minorities, as wish lists from "special interests." The right killed George W. Bush's effort at immigration reform in 2006, and was then captured wholesale by immigration restrictionists whose naked hostility to Latinos meant that Obama could preside over more than a million deportations and still win the Hispanic vote in a landslide. American Muslims, who once overwhelmingly voted for Bush, became a toxic fixation for Republicans who began to regard them as a potential fifth column. Granted a majority in Congress with a mandate to heal a bleak American economy, Republicans chose to focus on restricting women's access to abortion and birth control. Eager to deny Obama any legislative accomplishments whatsoever, the GOP attempted to filibuster the repeal of the military's policy banning gays and lesbians from open service. Republicans shouldn't blame Romney for his defeat, not after they paved such a narrow, winding road to victory. 

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