We ... can search for policy positions that better connect us to the concerns of voters.

The problem is right there. You shouldn't have to search for "policy positions that better connect" you to voter concerns. If you have to go searching for the things that concern voters it means you are tragically out of touch with us regular folks, and will likely never be in touch with us again.

The "policy positions" are staring you in the face - but you are opposed to all the "policy positions" that voters actually care about - when it comes to health care, reproductive rights, marriage rights etc. - you know what the majority of us want but you actively try to deny us these things. That's why you lost, it's not because you are too white it's because you are a bunch of bible-beating hypocrites. We voters hate bible-beating hypocrites no matter what color skin they have.

Try getting the Dominionists out of the GOP - that might actually make a difference.

... that it's funny.

It is so comical to watch Republicans continuously trying to convince themselves that the answer to the decline of their political power is to be found in "branding", "rebranding", "marketing", "remarketing", "spinning", "publicity" and "populism" with minorities and women.

Guys, your problem is your ideas! It is your ideology that is too old and too white, not the math! The math is a mere reflection of your ideas! When are you going to get that! So many of you have gone to good colleges and still this simple truth seems to be out of your intellectual reach.

Stop trying to present yourself in an untruthful light or lure a bunch of voters into voting for you. It's useless politics and very shortsighted. Even if it worked, you'd still be digging your grave.

Your answer is to be saught in your ideas! Takle the essence, stop tackling the wrapping paper. That's where the problem is. You're living in the past on so many issues, be them social, societal, global, economic, political. W. set America 30 years back. If you continue down that path, you're going to disappear, and it is only normal that Amercia doesn't want to disappear with you.

The ideas, guy. Your ideology. That's what people are fed up with. That's what you need to work on. That's your homework for the decade.

Also, stop promoting stupidity! Stop pushing people like W. and Palin down our throats. Start promoting intelligence, competence and progress, you may get somewhere.

Now, you're wrong about the media focusing on big urban centers during the last election - it was all the other way around! I didn't stop hearing about Ohio and rural Pennsylvania, Joe the Plummer, and other North and South Dakota, and rural and small town America being the very essence of the country, as though that's where 90% of the population lives! While these are important parts of America, they are hardly very represetative. The media gave disproportionate attention to these areas of the country, creating the false impression that McCain was doing well.

You're also wrong about Sotomayor. The behaviour of the GOP in the hearings is textbook of the GOP going downhill. Your party is so used to treating minorty colleagues as puppets and electoral props (Judge Thomas, Condi Rice, Michael Steel, Jindal, Sarah Palin, etc.), that when you're faced with the real deal competence and strenght from a minorty colleague (Obama, Colin Powell, Sotomayor), you just go bezerk! And it's so obvious, it'd be funny if it weren't sad. With Sotomayor, you're not only being uncivil, you're simply damaging yourselves.

And you're wrong to say it's only a question of math. Yes, a younger, more diverse America is now going to the voting booths, not only because of the changing demographics, but also because of the historical grassroots effort of the Obama campaign to get them to go vote. More people vote today than before, so the vote is more representative than it used to be, which is good for Democracy (and you forget to mention that!). But the real question is not so much the math - it is what it means. It means that, the more people vote, the more things shift a certain way, waving away from your ideology. Yes, things are no longer entirely in the hands of old, white men of protestant and anglo-saxon origin, but more importantly, they don't need to be. Or it's peril for the whole nation, as witnessed in the last decade.

Indeed, what the author completely forgets: There used to be not only a different demography but also a different Republican Party. What about your former senators in New York, Irving Ives, Jacob Javits and Nixon’s nemesis Charlie Goodell? What about Cliff Case in New Jersey, Tom Kuchel in California, and countless other moderates or even liberals? Well, grandfather Bush conveniently forgot his membership in Planned Parenthood when running for Senator in Connecticut in 1952, but apparently there was a time when it was safe for a Republican to be a social and even economic liberal. Gerald Ford who back in 1968 was considered the model Republican was pro-choice. And as late as 1989, Lowell Weicker was “dethroned” by a certain Joe Lieberman who as a Democrat was running to the right of the maverick Senator from, again, Connecticut.

Does Mr. Greener remember the domestic policies of Richard Nixon, left-bashing presidential candidate that he was in 1968? If your party calls socialism what Obama is doing today, what words are left for Nixon’s policies of price controls?

No, Mr. Greener, it is not the demographics, it is the combination of the Taft wing takeover of Republicanism and the anger of George Wallace’s southern constituency that produced the desaster your party is in today. Well, maybe I’m wrong: the reception in San Francisco’s Cow Palace of Republican Nelson Rockefeller by the Goldwaterites was a preview what was to come later. That is, the anger and the nuttiness have always been there, what with Joe McCarthy and gay chaser Ken Wherry in the early fifties. Nixon was the one who successfully fished in the remnants of those democratic heroes Theodore “the Man” Bilbo, "Cotton-Ed" Smith and Pat McCarran and prepared the GOP for what it is reduced to today: resentment and victimhood. It’s what’s fueling the torched earth electoral strategies of a Lee Atwater and a Karl Rove.

A final word to PierreSD: I am afraid that Henry Wallace’s verdict that the U.S. population is center-right still holds if you take a more historical perspective. Of course when Rush Limbaugh is the reference point, even Attila the Hun might be considered “center right”, and given that it would be inappropriate to speak of a “center right” inclination of your electorate. But don’t kid yourself, if the Obama administration isn’t quick enough to get out of the economic mess, even without a desperately needed renewal of the Republican party a President Romney or Barbour or Jindal could become reality faster than you imagine today.