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After the drubbing that Republicans took on November 4, who would want to chair the party's national committee? A lot of people, it turns out, because many Republicans think that their party needs a new face and a new message.

A new face, certainly. The voters have thoroughly repudiated President Bush and Vice President Cheney. GOP presidential nominee John McCain led his party to defeat. His running mate, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, is intensely polarizing. And Republicans are a minority in both chambers of Congress.

What about Mike Duncan? He's the current chairman of the Republican National Committee. "The American people still believe in the same values that the Republican Party did," Duncan said after the election. "We're a center-right nation. We're headed in the right direction with our party." A lot of people would quarrel with that assertion. And that is one reason Duncan will be challenged if he decides to run for re-election in January.

Leading Republicans are full of advice for their party. It usually involves returning to conservative principles rather than changing the party's message. "Americans do prefer a traditional conservative government," Sen. Jim DeMint of South Carolina declared at a meeting of Republican officials last week. "They just did not believe Republicans were going to give it to them." DeMint was the first high-ranking Republican to criticize McCain. For what? For abandoning conservative principles on campaign finance regulations, immigration, and the financial bailout.

Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty advised fellow Republicans to "regrow the party in a new and exciting way ... not changing the values and principles, but presenting them in a way that connects with people better, particularly the groups we didn't do well with."

That's a long list: Barack Obama carried men, women, African-Americans, Latinos, Asian-Americans, and young voters. He was the first Democratic presidential nominee since at least 1972 to win majority support from college graduates, nonunion voters, and suburbanites.

Obama's coalition looked like the New America. He brought people together, as he promised to do when he first garnered national attention with his keynote address to the 2004 Democratic National Convention. "The pundits like to slice and dice our country into red states and blue states," Obama noted four years ago in Boston. He insisted, "We are one people, all of us pledging allegiance to the Stars and Stripes, all of us defending the United States of America."

Obama carried the theme into his presidential campaign. He said at his final rally on November 3: "We can prove that we are more than a collection of red states and blue states. We are the United States of America."

McCain could have run as a uniter this year. "Again and again, I've worked with members of both parties to fix problems that need to be fixed," the senator from Arizona said in his acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention.

In the end, however, the Republican nominee chose a different path, the Karl Rove path of rallying the conservative base by demonizing your opponent. "He's in the far left lane of American politics," McCain said of Obama the day before the election. "My friends, he's even more liberal than the guy who used to call himself a socialist in the United States Senate."

McCain also chose a running mate who undermined any message of unity. Palin said in Greensboro, N.C., "We believe the best of America is in these small towns that we get to visit, in these wonderful little pockets of what I call the real America, being here with all of you hardworking, very patriotic, very pro-American areas of this great nation."

Independents ended up voting 52 percent to 44 percent for Obama, according to exit polls. This was the first presidential election since at least 1972 in which a majority of independents voted Democratic.

A Newsweek poll asked voters in October whether Obama is someone who can bring the country together. Sixty-two percent said yes. Asked the same question about McCain, just 42 percent said yes.

Republicans need to get over the culture wars of the 1960s. They need a spokesperson and a message that doesn't divide the country. Politics has been "us versus them" for too long.