E-mail:

Dear Mr. Lowry,
Let me suggest a sixth reason not to despair:
The ObamaCare bill – shortly to become law – has reeducated a lot of conservatives, libertarians, “none of the aboves”, and less-than committed Republicans about the realities of America’s two party system. If for whatever reasons – be they good, sincere, bad, insincere, or whatever – one may have looked outside of the Republican Party for political redemption, it is now brought home that we either support and work through the mechanism of the Republican Party, or we get what we got last night. . .

E-mail:

You write, “Republicans will have to defeat an incumbent president in 2012, never easy.”
“Never easy”? Try well-nigh impossible — for Republicans, anyway.
Since the birth of the GOP over a century and a half ago, the party has only managed that trick twice: against Jimmy Carter in 1976, which was the first time since Grover Cleveland in 1888.
Democrats, unfortunately, have had much better luck with Republican presidents.

And lots of e-mails expressing sentiments like this:

The war is over and we lost. That’s the reality. Conservatives can talk all they want about repeal and court challenges, but we have just met our Waterloo. Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid are all broke and we just added an entitlement which will make those programs look fiscally responsible. Now show me a democratic society that has ever voted itself away an entitlement program. In the course of a generation or two our country will look like the original democracy, Greece. . . .