The Republicans were combative:

Senator Mitch McConnell:

We’ll work with the administration when they agree with the people and confront them when they don’t. Choosing — I think what our friends on the other side learned is that choosing the president over your constituents is not a good strategy.
There are two opportunities for that change to occur. Our friends on the other side can change now and work with us to address the issues that are important to the American people, that we all understood. Or further change, obviously, can happen in 2012.

Governor Haley Barbour:

On behalf of the Republican governors, while governor’s races may be thought of as being separate or very different from what’s going on in Washington, in this case, even in governor’s races, this election was a referendum on Obama’s policies. And the policies of the Obama administration, the Pelosi-Reid Congress were repudiated by the voters.

Representative John Boehner:

Listen, I believe that the health care bill that was enacted by the current Congress will kill jobs in America, ruin the best health care system in the world, and bankrupt our country.
That means that we have to do everything we can to try to repeal this bill and replace it with commonsense reforms that’ll bring down the cost of health insurance.

The President was conciliatory:

Over the last two years, we’ve made progress.  But, clearly, too many Americans haven’t felt that progress yet, and they told us that yesterday. And as President, I take responsibility for that.
What yesterday also told us is that no one party will be able to dictate where we go from here, that we must find common ground in order to set — in order to make progress on some uncommonly difficult challenges.  And I told John Boehner and Mitch McConnell last night I am very eager to sit down with members of both parties and figure out how we can move forward together.
I’m not suggesting this will be easy.  I won’t pretend that we will be able to bridge every difference or solve every disagreement.  There’s a reason we have two parties in this country, and both Democrats and Republicans have certain beliefs and certain principles that each feels cannot be compromised.  But what I think the American people are expecting, and what we owe them, is to focus on those issues that affect their jobs, their security, and their future:  reducing our deficit, promoting a clean energy economy, making sure that our children are the best educated in the world, making sure that we’re making the investments in technology that will allow us to keep our competitive edge in the global economy.

These statements summarize the new political terrain, and they reveal very significant problems.  The Republicans speak as if the American people have one clear and unanimous voice that just says “yes” to them and” no” to the Democrats. They believe that they can govern in the name of the people, even though this election clearly indicates that the citizenry is not unanimous in its support of all their policy positions.  The overall vote went 52% to 45% for Republicans, mirroring the results of the last election, which went by the same numbers in the opposite direction. Exit polling indicates the public is evenly split between those who think the top priority is increased stimulus spending for the creation of new jobs and those who think the top priority should be reducing the deficit.

But the Republicans are demanding a populist enactment, the sort of position that the Founders tried to avoid by making the House more responsive, the Senate more deliberative, and separating power between the executive and the legislative branches of government.

The Republicans did win in this election cycle, while they lost in the last, and we have a representative structure that reflects this.  It seems to me that this means that the President’s position of bipartisanship, contrary to his critics on the left and the right, actually is the wise democratically mandated response to the voice of the people.  What the mandate for bipartisanship might and should yield is another question, which we should discuss in the near future.