Why Obama won

President-elect Barack Obama won a solid victory on Tuesday night. He won states and counties that a Democrat has not carried in decades. For the last 21 months Obama crisscrossed the United States taking his message of change and inspiring millions of Americans, particularly young voters. Couple the swell of voters with a national dis-satisfaction with the Bush White House and it was a formula made for victory. While Sen. McCain repeatedly told people he is not President Bush, there was no difference in the minds of the voting public.

But there is another factor in McCain's loss - the shift in policy within the Republican Party itself. For years the Grand Old Party stood for ideals like fiscal responsibility, limited government and individual liberty. But over the past couple of decades, the party has morphed into something that conservative icons like Barry Goldwater and even Ronald Reagan would find alien. Now the Republican Party, at least nationally, mirrors every criticism hurled at the Democratic Party by conservative pundits. The size of the federal government has grown exponentially in the past eight years and the national debt has more than doubled to $10 trillion which has rocked the national economy.

President Bush is the current head of the Republican Party and like it or not, this election was as much about the failures of his administration as it was about the weakness of McCain's candidacy.