When Journalism Turns Personal

But not any more. Unnamed McCain aides tell Fox's Carl Cameron that Palin didn't know which countries were in NATO; the essence of NAFTA, or that Africa was a continent, not a country. She refused interview prep before the Katie sitdown, Cameron reports, and later threw "tantrums" and was so "nasty" that she reduced some staffers to tears. It's getting brutal.

Transition speculation is underway, and the floating of Caroline Kennedy's name as a possible ambassador to the United Nations prompts the inspired New York Post headline: "BAMELOT."

Why did Obama win, and what does it mean?

Politico's John Harris and Jim VandeHei see nothing less than an earthquake:

"For most of the past 30 years, since the dawn of the Reagan Era, conservatives have held the momentum in American politics. Even the Clinton years were shaped -- and constrained -- by conservative ideas (work requirements for welfare, the Defense of Marriage Act) and conservative rhetoric ('the era of Big Government is over'). Republicans rode this wave to win the presidency five of seven times since 1980, and to dominate Congress for a dozen years after 1994. Now the wave has crashed, breaking the back of the modern Republican Party in the process.

"Obama's victory and the second straight election to award big gains to congressional Democrats showed that the 2006 election was not, as Karl Rove and others argued at the time, a flukish result that reflected isolated scandals in the headlines at the time. Republicans lost their reform mantle. Voters who wanted change voted for Obama 89 percent to 9 percent. They lost their decisive edge on national security. They even lost the battle over taxes."

McCain confidant Mark Salter tells Roger Simon: "I do believe and will never be dissuaded otherwise that the media had their thumb on the scale. Maybe if the media had been fair, we still would have lost. But there were two different standards of scrutiny for us and Obama."

National Review wonders whether Obama is a closet righty:

"All Americans should be glad that a black American has been able to make it to the presidency, and hope that President-elect Barack Obama's time in office will redound to the country's long-term benefit. We wish the outcome of yesterday's elections had been different . . .

"Yet the public has not embraced many of the central aspects of liberalism. President-elect Barack Obama's record and positions put him well to the left of any president in the last four decades. But to judge from his campaign, he is a man who wants to cut taxes, defend an individual right to own guns, take a hard line on terrorists in Pakistan, reduce the abortion rate, allow people to keep their health-care plans, and keep trade free. The polls suggest that he was wise to run in this fashion: They show that the public remains as skeptical about federal activism and social liberalism as they have been for years. The public has, however, clearly rejected the Republican party in its present configuration."

Rush Limbaugh strikes a defiant chord:

"We're being told here today by the wizards of smart on our side, 'We need to be gracious in defeat.' My answer to that is, 'Screw defeat! Screw this whole notion that we have to sit around and try to show these people that we're the nice people, that they don't think that we are.' . . . We gotta be honest with ourselves about why we lost this battle . . . And the core of the problem is that the Republican Party (for some inexplicable reason that I don't care about now) decided to abandon conservatism."