Can the GOP be the Party of Ideas
“The Republican ranks were full of people up and down the line,” he said, “from the average voter to sophisticated operatives, that were of the view that if we’d just been a little more pure in the Bush years, none of this would have happened, and the path to power is just to purify ourselves.”
.. “The result of the 2012 election was more disorienting than the ’08 election,” Ponnuru said. He described his futile attempt to educate House members at their annual retreat in January 2013, when Ponnuru worked through data showing that the loss couldn’t be pinned on Romney alone. “As much as people say Romney was a weak candidate, he ran ahead of Senate candidates in almost every state” — a crucial point that Ponnuru mentioned to the Republican caucus.
.. In December 2013, Ponnuru left her job on the Hill to become YG Network’s policy director.. She, too, talked at length about how the party was out of touch. “The biggest problem is that the politicians don’t represent the people. We’re identified with the rich and big business,” she said, ticking off a list of constituencies that Republicans have alienated: “Single women, Hispanics, young people.” Also as a wife and mother, she had serious doubts about any movement “that can offer nothing to a married woman with three children at the bottom half” of the economic heap.
.. The situation in 2014 looks very different. It is hard to make the case that a new age of liberalism even exists to be rolled back. The shadow of Reagan still looms large. Bill Clinton, the Democrat who broke the Republicans’ streak of victories in 1992, did so as a centrist New Democrat who repudiated the liberal doctrine of his day on issues like race and welfare and diligently courted the blue-collar, white ethnic vote. His famous “triangulation” consisted of compromises with Republicans, and he made so many that conservatives complained he was stealing their ideas.
Today many on the right, including the reformicons, insistently depict Obama as a radical, but they are well aware he kept all but the top sliver of George W. Bush’s giant tax cut. And for all the efforts to discredit Obamacare, it was ratified by the most conservative Supreme Court in modern history. Every reformer I talked to acknowledged that the principle of universal coverage is here to stay, in whatever form, including the operations advanced by Republicans who want to “repeal and replace” Obama’s plan, the basis of which was hatched from a conservative policy suggestion that originated in 1989 from the Heritage Foundation.