The election is finally over, but the relief comes with a fair amount of pain for Republican voters who, like me, were hoping for an election night miracle. One by one, many of the politicians I’ve spent weeks and months campaigning for fell by the wayside. There were glimmers of hope — Senate kept its filibuster-proof 60 vote majority and some House Republican candidates achieved victories in Minnesota and elsewhere — but calling the night a success for conservative values is pretty optimistic by anyone’s standards. My mom always tells me that “failure builds character,” but gaining so much character in one night was hard to take.

Now, I’ve been told that you liberal Democrats are supposed to be extremely compassionate and look out for the needs of the less fortunate, and there are few less fortunate people on campus right now than Republicans. You may not have noticed their pain as you undoubtedly partied in celebration of your good fortune, but we’re out there, and we are in desperate need of consolation in these darkest of days.

So after the euphoric state wears off and you see the suffering minority in your midst, as a poor and disheartened Republican I plead to you, do you think you could spread the emotional wealth around and give out free hugs to all of your Republican friends? If you are not yet convinced we are in need of any affection, let me enlighten you as to the plight we suffered during this election and see if I can’t change your mind.

From the very beginning, many of us were jealous of all the attention the Democrats got in their primary contest. The first African-American president, the first woman president, the first Hispanic president or the first UFO-seeing president were just a handful of the exciting options you had for your nomination. The most exciting contests we had on our side were who could say “9/11” during the discussion of every issue or who could part their hair most like Ronald Reagan. Our old white guys just don’t understand what it takes to win over the American electorate. Explaining the threat of global terrorism or elaborating on how socialism will destroy the American economy for generations is simply not as much fun as creating campaign symbols that look like a rising sun or asking for change more times than a bum in Times Square. (When President-elect Obama runs for re-election in 2012, will his campaign slogan be “Change we can’t afford to change!”?)

Our next painful challenge involved showing enthusiastic support for the oldest and whitest of them all! John McCain has long been a thorn in the side of most Republicans for his liberal tendencies, but when confronted with a smooth-talking liberal running on tax increases and government-mandated health care, we all hopped on the Straight-Talk Express bandwagon. Republicans have great respect for John McCain’s military service and trust him on foreign policy, but his Ted Kennedy-endorsed immigration proposals, his Al Gore-esque global warming stance and his flirtations with the Pro-Choice movement were pretty hard blockades for us to look past.

In the end, many of us united around how wrong we found Barack Obama’s socialist-leaning ideas to be, but the candidate we conservatives yearned for died four years ago and already served his eight years in the White House.

We wave the white flag of surrender for this election and ask that all of you Democrats have mercy on us during the next four years. Barack Obama will now be our President, Democrats will strongly control both houses of Congress and we must respect the will of the American people. I just hope that if we Republicans give our support, Democrats will be willing to give real consideration to the views and concerns of our side. We would appreciate if you would not raise our taxes too high, if you could refrain from cutting our military down to a Boy Scout troop and if you could possibly hold yourselves back from signing over our sovereignty to the United Nations or the European Union.

Have I convinced you that we are in desperate need of a hug? If not, then I guess we’ll just have to lick our own wounds and prepare for the next battle in 2010. We have been bent in this election, but we are not broken, and many of us still believe strongly that the American people tend to agree with our views when we articulate them clearly. The party of Abraham Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan still has a bright future and can lead America to prosperity, but for now we’d just like to suck our thumbs and pout for a while.