I would argue that supporting health care policy changes in the direction suggested by Yuval Levin and James Capretta would be a move to the right even if the total amount government spends on health care would (mostly for demographic reasons) be larger than it was twenty years ago (though smaller than the Democrats might like.) Same thing with tax reform. There is more to be gained by a tax reform that is pro-parent, but also pro-growth and maybe attainable than never-gonna-happen promises of large across-the-board income tax cuts. And the alternative would be some moderated version of what Nancy Pelosi might want. The thing is that such a policy outcome would in some ways be well to the right of the status quo or event the pre-Obama status quo.

and i can see republicans winning, as you note, with a better candidate and some kind of revamped message.

but will they be republicans prepared to do very much, or just another version of a caretaker party inside of a new consensus? will they stand to obama like nixon to fdr? some of the middle class appeal stuff sounds like that. i will end up voting for them, but what will victory mean?

the republican party as i see makes two claims: that it supports liberty, and that it is prepared to manage things better than the opposition whose approach to things is leading us at best to mediocrity and worst to economic crisis and perhaps foreign policy crisis as well. Of course, people can agree or disagree with the second point, and we won’t know until we know, i.e., until the policies being followed are seen in light of results and consequences, not just predictions.

the opening for republicans who can do something significant will come only at a point of reckoning, when/if the course of certain policies show that they are producing a disaster. when does the unsustainable prove to be really unsustainable? maybe, if we are lucky, americans will see examples of this close enough to make the requisite changes while there is still time…. both in domestic and foreign affairs.

as for 2012, i still saw a mitt victory 8 days before the election. only the explanation industry makes us think otherwise. and i surely would have liked his chances with a 9 percent unemployment rate, changing demographics or not. but all this has nothing to do with the future, anyhow

There were people within the center-right who, each in their own way, argued for a more responsible and middle-class-oriented agenda. I’m thinking of Mitch Daniels, and Jeb Bush. I also think that Scott Walker and Paul Ryan made some noises in that direction (though one can question how middle-class friendly elements of Ryan’s original Roadmap were.) Among journalists you had Ross Douthat and Ramesh Ponnuru. I suspect that significant elements of the donor class would have been on board with something better and that those donors ended up with Romney by default.

But none of those guys ran. Is it possible that a better GOP candidate could have run and won in 2012? Maybe. I think Romney left some points on the field. On the other hand, it wasn’t really that close. Obama won by three point six percent. I’m not sure a better candidate. (and let’s remember that no better candidate ran) does four percent better. I don’t think Bush could have overcome the burden of his name. I’d like to think Daniels would have done better, but we’ll never know.

Maybe it took this kind of shocking defeat for a candidate who ran a consultant by-the-numbers campaign for the Republicans to really get to work at revamping their policy agenda and messaging instead of trying to just run another increasingly self-parodying version of the Reagan campaign.

In what way would Jeb Bush have been a stronger candidate than Romney? It seems to me that Jeb would have had most of the same weaknesses as Romney – a plutocratic/Chamber of Commerce type with no specific agenda to appeal to middle class/working class voters, and who comes across as the sort of management type who tells people they’re being fired. In addition, do you really think that the American people would have been ready in 2012 to elect George W’s younger brother to the White House?

Perhaps you mean to suggest that more Latinos would have voted for Jeb. Well, maybe so, but I rather doubt it would have been enough to make any difference – or to make up for the votes he would have lost by reason of his pro-amnesty position on immigration.

It seems to me that Mitch Daniels might well have been a stronger candidate than Romney (even though Daniels could have been attacked for his service in the Bush administration). Other than Daniels – and I’m not saying
Daniels would have won, either – I can’t think of anyone.

For an example of a mainstream conservative movement spokesman (pretending to be a journalist) who really does seem to think that “the median voter of 2012 was someone who had voted for Reagan in 1984 and George H.W. Bush in 1988,” see Fred Barnes’s article in the Nov 19th Weekly Standard. In this piece, Barnes attributes the Democrats’ victory entirely to Obama’s personal appeal. Further, he insists that America remains a “center-right” nation and that Republicans retain all of the “advantages” they had in decades past.

Does Barnes really believe this pathetic happy talk? Or is he just trying to keep up “morale” among the GOP footsoldiers who read him?

By the way, it’s been pointed out that immigration cannot explain the Republicans’ disappointing results in Montana (an overwhelmingly white state), which was carried by Romney but elected Democrats to all statewide offices (including the Senate).

It should also be noted that, as I read in John Podhoretz’s election postmortem, Romney generally ran ahead of Republican senate and gubernatorial candidates in states where there was a genuine contest for those offices. Which supports your point that Romney’s deficiencies were not the heart of the Republicans’ problem with the electorate.