Republicans confess to waking in a cold sweat

At the Four Seasons Hotel in Washington DC one evening this week, the cream of the capital's conservative set gathered for dinner. It was the annual B C Lee Lecture, a party thrown by the Heritage Foundation, the think-tank at the heart of the Reagan revolution.

The guests were some of DC's sharpest conservative thinkers and movers and shakers from the past three decades. Median hair colour: white. Median skin colour: white. Past speakers at the event include Henry Kissinger, Colin Powell, Condoleezza Rice and, in 2007, Henry Paulson. This year we got Reagan's former national security adviser Richard V Allen – "Dick" to his friends.

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One jocular fellow, a fundraiser of some distinction, described the two types of sleeping tablets he is currently taking to prevent himself waking at 3am in a cold sweat at the thought of an Obama presidency. A former Reagan staffer sipped a pink cocktail and talked of her own fears about the Democrat candidate's background: "I lived in the Middle East, you know..."

The people in that room seemed more convinced of the inevitability of an Obama landslide than any young Democrats I've spoken to in the past week. They spoke with fearful reverence of Obama's rhetorical skills and reflected on the Democrat's innovative, internet money machine. And many, being from the intellectual end of the Republican Party, lamented their candidate's choice of Sarah Palin for running mate.

They are not alone – conservative politicos-turned-pundits such as Peggy Noonan and David Frum have been taking potshots at Palin for weeks.

Yet for some at the Heritage Foundation, the crushing loss that now seems inevitable is also an opportunity: a wilderness period in which to re-examine conservatism, and to resolve the differences within the Republican party – between traditional, thoughtful conservatives and their apparently anti-intellectual counterparts – which have brought them to this moment after three decades of domination.

This could be the think-tank's chance to set the tone of conservative Washington again, 27 years on: to rebuild, as one put it, "the big tent". Lucky then, that Heritage's day-to-day staff are somewhat younger than most of its dinner guests. They'll need them to generate some new ideas and, perhaps, to seek out some new leaders.