Post Election Media Analysis...

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A run down of interesting post election articles.

Voters demanded change from Washington on Tuesday, and Republicans say it’s now up to President Barack Obama to deliver it.

But don’t count on that happening.

The White House that emerges after the midterm elections won’t look, act or sound drastically different than the one battered for months by Republicans and abandoned by Democrats desperate to hang onto power. The president will seek some common ground with Republicans, but there are limits to how far Obama wants to go — and Senate Democrats will let him go.

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WASHINGTON — Two things were clear long before the votes were counted on Tuesday night: President Obama would face a Congress with more Republicans for his final two years in office, and the results would be seen as a repudiation of his leadership.

But that was not the way Mr. Obama saw it. The electoral map was stacked against him, he argued, making Democrats underdogs from the start. And his own party kept him off the trail, meaning he never really got the chance to make his case. “You’re in the Final Four,” as one aide put it, “and you’re on the bench with a walking boot and you don’t get to play.”

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1) The Democrats lost.

Badly. This wasn't just a tough map. Democrats lost Senate seats in Iowa and Colorado. They lost governor races in Florida and Wisconsin. Hell, they lost governor races in Illinois, Maryland, Maine, and Massachusetts! Democrats really can't blame losing elections in Illinois, Maryland, Maine, and Massachusetts on the map. (See the results from key races here.)

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Republicans would like the country to believe that they took control of the Senate on Tuesday by advocating a strong, appealing agenda of job creation, tax reform and spending cuts. But, in reality, they did nothing of the sort.

Even the voters who supported Republican candidates would have a hard time explaining what their choices are going to do. That’s because virtually every Republican candidate campaigned on only one thing: what they called the failure of President Obama. In speech after speech, ad after ad, they relentlessly linked their Democratic opponent to the president and vowed that they would put an end to everything they say the public hates about his administration.

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In his own news conference in Louisville, Ky., Senator Mitch McConnell, who is likely to lead the new Republican majority in the Senate next year, vowed a spirit of cooperation and compromise with Mr. Obama even as he cautioned that a more starkly divided government in Washington would inevitably lead to sharp partisan disagreements.

“When the American people choose divided government, I don’t think it means they don’t want us to do anything,” Mr. McConnell told reporters in his first news conference since his party trounced Democrats in Tuesday’s elections. “We ought to start with the view that maybe there are some things we can agree on to make progress for the country.”

Mr. McConnell largely sidestepped the most divisive issues that are likely to create conflict between his members and Mr. Obama. And he played down ideological differences among his own members that might disrupt any efforts to compromise with the president.

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Sen. Mitch McConnell was giddy, not an emotion often seen in the sober 72-year-old Kentuckian. But that’s the only way to describe TIME’s interview with him in Perry County, Kentucky, on Monday afternoon.

Asked to imagine it was Wednesday morning and he wakes up majority leader—a position he’s aspired to, he says, since the 5th grade—McConnell strikes a conciliatory tone, saying he hopes to work with President Obama and Senate Democrats. He said there would be no shutdowns on his watch, despite the fact that he plans to use funding bills to force changes in Obama’s policies.

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Lots more post election "stuff" at Memeorandum.