Clues to the new political landscape

TUESDAY WAS an election that changed the political landscape -- and Wednesday a time to look for clues about how the state's political actors will now comport themselves.

With Democratic gains giving them control of both the House of Representatives and the US Senate, most observers have interpreted the midterms as a rejection of the Bush administration's stubborn conservatism.

Oh, those purblind political analysts. That's certainly not what Mitt Romney spotted at play in the land. He espied a demand for Republicans to man the ideological ramparts.

"Americans spoke last night, and Republicans are listening," Romney declared in a statement. "Americans have not become less conservative, but they believe some Republicans have."

Voters, he added, "told us to move forward by embracing our conservative convictions that Americans agree with and value -- and we will."

So even as George W. Bush was conceding that the GOP had gotten a thumping and was finally jettisoning Don Rumsfeld and making a nod toward bipartisanship, Romney was opining that what the voters really wanted was leadership like Ronald Reagan's. (He didn't say just which handsome governor would become this era's Reagan, but somehow that wasn't hard to figure out.)

Translation: A presidential hopeful determinedly courting his party's right-wing won't be deterred by Tuesday's rebuff of conservatism, even though his own campaign efforts as chairman of the Republican Governors Association proved disappointing.

Rather, he will redouble his attempt to make himself the favorite of the starboard side.

That strategy may well help Romney become John McCain's principal rival for the GOP presidential nomination. But it will require ever more contortions for the man who four years ago sold himself to Massachusetts as a moderate.

For his part, Governor-elect Deval Patrick met with both Romney and the press -- and made it clear he was keeping his policy options open. Asked about Romney's call to take the turnpike tolls down, Patrick signaled that he won't be railroaded on the politically popular issue.

"We ought to make facts-based, evidence-based decisions," he said. "And I am trusting and counting on the governor to do that while he remains governor."

There's a clear message there both to voters and Romney -- and it's a smart one.

But just as interesting was what Patrick did not do: He declined to issue a strong exhortation for the Legislature to defeat a proposed constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage. Instead, the governor-elect contented himself with saying that he thought the state Supreme Judicial Court's decision had been right, and that he wished the Legislature would get on to other work.

Would he make that point of view clear to legislators?

"I have made my position known just in this way throughout the campaign and again just now," Patrick replied.

Translation: Although he supports gay marriage, the governor-elect had decided not to make an early, high-profile, image-defining expenditure of political capital against the amendment. (Last night, the Legislature all but killed the measure.)

If Patrick was savoring his victory, legislative Republicans were regrouping after defeat.

Publicly, that task fell to House minority leader Brad Jones and Senator Richard Tisei, who will become the Senate minority leader in January. With the GOP's rag tag legislative ranks down by another lost Senate seat and two House seats, the two resembled the crew of a political Poseidon, submerged even deeper by the huge Patrick wave.

Still, they professed to find optimism in the sheer abjectness of their plight.

"We're at rock bottom right now, and the only place to go is up," said Tisei.

Why, losing the governor's office "might be what the party needs to rejuvenate itself," he added.

Still more good news: The GOP's legislative ranks are too small to form a circular firing squad, said Jones.

If Romney professed to believe the national election results were a call for conservatism, Tisei plainly thought the governor's metamorphosis from moderate to conservative had hurt the party here. Locally, Republicans need to be less conservative and more libertarian, he made it a point to say.

So how will the party's legislative leaders proceed?

Well, said Jones, they hope to use the media to advance an alternative message "when we think the Democratic majority is doing things . . . that aren't really where the public wants to be."

Translation: Right now, Republican fortunes are so dreary that the GOP's legislative leaders see their best chance as hoping for the overreach that so often comes of one-party rule.

Scot Lehigh's e-mail address is lehigh@globe.com.