Next Sunday, Mitt Romney will do his first major post-election interview with, unsurprisingly, Fox News. This means it's time for any number of retrospective news pieces on what went wrong, featuring Republicans who took part in the Romney campaign. Now, most of these are going to be boring, intellectually lazy rehashes that concede one or two points to the Obama team, like this clip, in which Romney strategist Stuart Stevens admits that the media wasn't strictly "in the tank" for Obama...

...but there's a lot of subtext that we're going to have to keep an eye on, because it's going to tell us a lot about the future of the Republican Party. If Romney continues to blame his loss on the 47% of Americans who he thinks Obama gives gifts to, and if other Republicans agree with that assessment, they'll have effectively learned absolutely nothing from their loss this time.

The fact that GOProud and the Log Cabin Republicans aren't going to the Conservative Political Action Conference this year is a bad sign; the rumors that Chris Christie won't be invited are even worse. For Republicans to win elections, they're going to have to concede some ground. Mitt Romney's carefully groomed-and-edited Fox News interview would be a good place to begin that process. If that doesn't happen, the Republican Party will be stuck in teabaggy 2012 for at least the next two years.