Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Atlantic: “The United States of America, whose media has long been held hostage by the vendors of hair-tonic and lead alchemy, saw those self-same vendors shamed, embarrassed, and reduced to self-mockery before the world. The United States of America, a country with the vending of black people barely out of living memory, with the systemic white supremacy very much in its living memory, re-elected a black president.”

Philip Rucker, Washington Post: “But Romney’s top aides, who only a couple of days ago were openly speculating about who would fill which jobs in a Romney administration, woke up Wednesday to face brutal recriminations. Some top donors privately unloaded on Romney’s senior staff, describing it as a junior varsity operation that failed to adequately insulate and defend Romney through a summer of relentless attacks from the Obama campaign over his business career and personal wealth.”

Michael Gerson, The Washington Post: “First: Mitt Romney was not a particularly bad candidate.  He was precisely the type of broadly acceptable, business-oriented figure with which the GOP is traditionally identified.  But a generic Republican could not win the presidency, even in a relatively favorable year. Second: Every one of Romney’s opponents in the Republican primaries would have done worse — most of them dramatically worse.”

Andrew Sullivan, The Daily Beast: “The president’s oration was almost a summation of his core belief: that against the odds, human beings can actually better ourselves, morally, ethically, materially, and we can do so more powerfully together than alone, and that nowhere exemplifies that endeavor more than America. It was Lincolnian in its cadences, and in some ways, was the final, impassioned, heart-felt rebuke to all those, including his opponent, who tried to portray him as somehow un-American. How deeply that must have cut. How emphatically did he rebut the charge.”

Jacob Weisberg, Slate: “He ran a disastrous GOP convention. He never found a way to talk about himself or his agenda in a way that middle class voters could relate to. But even a clumsy candidate might have beaten Obama if not for a simple factor that could not be overcome: the GOP’s growing extremism. The Republican strategy of making the election a referendum on the president’s handling of the economy was perfectly sound. The problem was that the Republican Party couldn’t pass the credibility test itself. For many voters disenchanted with Obama, it still was not safe to vote for his opponent.”