posted December 14, 2016 10:19 AM            

As any parent can tell you, there is a moment every night when the adult in the room has to turn off the lights and send the kids to bed. It could be after a good movie, or a game that the home team lost, or any other event. It doesn't always make the adult popular but it does teach the kids that it's time to sleep and put this day behind.

Where is the adult Democrat who will turn off the lights of 2016 and send his party to sleep? We don't see one so far!

Michael Barone has a little free advice for Democrats that they ought to listen to:

The first thing Democrats need to do is to end the alibi game.

Yes, it's a shattering experience to lose a presidential election that, until the 9 o'clock hour on election night, you seemed sure to win.

But alibis don't help you win next time. Don't blame "fake news" when your candidate had lots more money to spend delivering her message.

Don't blame the FBI director when your candidate violated criminal laws and the attorney general had to disqualify herself after revelation of her secret meeting with the candidate's husband.

Don't blame the "racism" of an electorate that twice elected the first black president.

Don't blame the Electoral College when everyone knew beforehand that you need 270 electoral votes, not a popular vote plurality, to win.

Blame instead the Clinton campaign's "ascendant America" strategy -- to reassemble the 2012 Obama coalition of nonwhites and millennials, on the assumption that the attitudes of other voters, notably white non-college graduates who cast critical Obama votes in the Midwest, would remain static.

Exit polls showed that Donald Trump, supposedly toxic to nonwhites, ran slightly better among them than Mitt Romney did in 2012. Their apparent regression to the mean, to voting more like the national average, undercuts the theory that nonwhites, tormented by oppression and seething with grievance, will remain overwhelmingly Democratic forever.

Losing is hard.

We understand that Mrs. Bush told Bush-41, who was apparently down, to get over the 1992 defeat.

It's difficult to come so close and walk away with the "L" rather than the "W", as any Rangers' fan will tell you.

Nevertheless, it's time to move on. It's over.

It does not do the country any good to continue talking about an election that the Democrats lost. It does not help the Democrats either, especially when one looks at the state of the party from coast to coast.