Still trying to wrap your head around that 18-month, six-billion dollar campaign? Not quite sure what to make of Tuesday's results? Not to worry: for the next few days we'll be surveying the best and brightest in politics and the punditry to help you make sense of it all.
With Time's TV critic, James Poniewozik
GQ: What the f*ck did we just do for the last year?
JP: Spent a year and billions of dollars to produce the same government we had before, in a primary and general election whose outcome you could have predicted in summer 2011. Held a passionate debate over a stark choice between two visions of organizing society, mainly by eating chicken sandwiches or posting pictures on Twitter of ourselves pointing at empty chairs. In the end, the President was re-elected, because of his supporters' unprecedented superiority in the field of creating droll Internet memes.
GQ: What does the Republican party (or in your case, what does Fox News in the context of election night meltdown) need to do now?
JP: The problem for Fox is the problem of the Republican party: what it takes to please its passionate, engaged base is precisely the opposite of what it would take to appeal to a broad audience. Fortunately for Foxas it has proved for the past decade as the top-rated cable news channelin the TV business, being an increasingly strident niche brand aimed at superserving pissed-off white people is great for ratings. For winning national elections, maybe not so much.
GQ: What does MSNBC need to do in his second term (in terms of growing/building their audience and becoming a better network)?
JP: MSNBC's challenge is that it has to be two things, both because of its liberal audience and its association with NBC News: a comfortable bubble of like-minded thought for progressives and a straight-playing news outlet that will tell them what they don't want to hear when reality dictates it. Some of their hosts, like Rachel Maddow, do a good job balancing these two roles, but it has too many blustery partisan hatchet men like Ed Schultz. If it becomes too much a mouthpiece for Obama Democrats, it could run into the same problem as Fox, which started to feel stale (and hit a bit of a ratings slump) in the latter Bush years.
GQ: What's the lesson you're taking away from this election?
JP: The huge role of social media, like Twitter, in amplifying and framing big events like the conventions and debatespartly because it has so much influence on old-media journalism. Everyone's in the spin room now.
GQ: What is the most astonishing thing about the race to you?
JP: Most negative surprise: how a campaign about big genuine differences in what kind of society we want to have became about petty outrages and nontroversiesBig Bird, Joe Biden gaffes, the GOP built its whole convention around "You Didn't Build That," we spent days debating how many bayonets the military uses. Most positive: that a lot of the mainstream media embraced the idea of fact-checking B.S. claimseven if they got called biased for it, and even if voters ignored them anyway.
GQ: Give us one song that sums up your feelings about the end of the campaign.
JP: The Clash, "I'm So Bored With the USA"
Follow Marin Cogan on Twitter for more updates from the political scene in Washington and on the campaign trail.