It is hard to resist gloating and Obama’s team did not try very hard.

Obama’s campaign team – David Axelrod, Jim Messina, David Plouffe and Stephanie Cutter – held their last teleconference with reporters this afternoon: the Victory Teleconference Call.

There are conventions to be followed, such as praising the other team for fighting hard. Niceties dispensed with, Axelrod got in a few kicks.

First of all, the Republicans had “painted themselves out of the mainstream”, Axelrod said. Returning to the theme later in the call, he said: “The Republican party is going to have some soul-searching to do: whether they are going to represent the United States of America as it is and not based on some 50-year-old model.”

He had found heartening that the super pacs had not had much impact. “You can’t buy the White House. You can’t overwhelm Congress with this money,” he said. In a swipe directly at the co-founder of the Crossroads super pac, Karl Rove, he said that if he had been one of the donors to Crossroads, he would be asking what happened: “They did not get much for their money.”

A really interesting question towards the end. Would the Obama team be keeping its organisation intact, with all those lists of supporters? The implication, I think, is that Obama could use it to give Hillary Clinton a strong start if she stands in 2016. Payback for Bill’s convention speech and all those campaign stops on Obama’s behalf?

Plouffe suggested the organisation will be kept intact with supporters playing an important part in providing grassroots support for the president on individual issues. But Plouffe understood the implication of the question, saying that you just can’t hand over a list of supporters and expect another candidate to win. Those supporters worked for Obama because they believed in him.

Axelrod parted with a riposte to Republicans who grumbled the media was in the tank for Obama. “We never thought of you guys as rooters,” Axelrod said.