who has this to say about the GOP’s mood (it’s the last item in the post):
Conservatives I’ve met in D.C. so far have been near-ebullient, not downcast or bitter. Why? a) They know how unhappy they’d be now if McCain had won; b) Obama has not fulfilled their worst fears, or even second-to-worst fears; c) now they can be an honest, straight-up opposition.
Oddly enough, b) might be the least important of the three. a) and c) go together, really; the shots from Democrats that John McCain represented “a Bush third term” weren’t fair on the whole, but there is one respect in which he would have been a continuation of the Bush administration: it would have been four more years, for conservatives, of gritting teeth and biting tongues on a great many policies (more than with President Bush, I’m sure) so as not to undermine him on the few key ones on which we agree. Valued commenter and colleague Doug Hagler has argued repeatedly in his comments here that Republicans don’t believe in free markets any more than the Democrats do, and that there is no party of small government; that isn’t true on a grassroots level, or among the more junior leaders of the party, but it’s been true on a national level for quite some time, and this is a lot of the reason. The GOP hasn’t put up an economic conservative as its presidential candidate since Reagan (though George H. W. Bush talked the talk long enough to get elected); and while the party won both houses of Congress on a conservative platform in 1994, power and its seductions bent the congressional GOP leadership away from that in time. Conservatives in the party, in order to hold fast to conservative positions, would have had to go into opposition en masse to their own party—which probably would have looked severely counterproductive at the time, since it would undoubtedly have swung the federal government as a whole to the left. In the long run, I’m not sure it would have been counterproductive at all, but that would have been a pretty long gamble to play . . . and might very likely have cost those conservatives their seats. Would it have been worth it anyway to preserve a greater integrity to a conservative opposition? Perhaps, but I doubt we’ll ever be able to say for sure.In any case, as Kaus notes, that particular problem has now been solved (in the most drastic fashion possible); the party has been purged to a considerable extent, and exiled to the outer darkness for its misdeeds. That means it’s a long road back, but as conservatives, we can be glad simply to be on the road back—it has at least turned around—and to have a new generation of leaders rising up, folks like Governors Sarah Palin and Bobby Jindal, and Representatives Eric Cantor, Paul Ryan and Kevin McCarthy, to guide us on the way. It means it’s the ideal time to begin to make the GOP a conservative party once again—and perhaps, this time, to learn from the mistakes of the last time, and keep it one.
