When I fretted to my friend and colleague Jay Nordlinger that Republicans may learn the wrong lessons from success in 2014, he noted sagely that he prefers to wait until the results are in before drawing any lessons. While that ought to have stayed my hand, I think some contours are discernible, and so I plunge in!

The 2012 election was essentially a protracted exercise in character assassination. Democrats painted Mitt Romney and Republicans generally as extremist cretins who held rigid views on abortion, were hostile to the point of combat toward women, engineered the financial crisis to benefit their rich cronies and cared so little for working people that they supported tax breaks for companies that shipped jobs overseas.