Below The Beltway

Nick Ragone ponders the future of the Republican Party:

If the polls don’t change in the next two weeks, the Republicans need to start thinking about what type of opposition party they will be. The Democrats will control the presidency and both houses of Congress with huge majorities, and a word of note to Republicans: they’ll be in a maniacally activist mood.

For the Republicans in Congress, there are really two models to choose from. They can pattern themselves after the “go along, get along” Republicans in Congress that mostly played nicely with the Democrats in order to get some pork projects here and there. They didn’t ruffle too many feathers, got some crumbs thrown there way on occasion, and were part of a 40 year Republican minority in Congress.

Or they can look to more recent history, the class of 1993. That was the year Newt Gingrich took over the party, and the Republicans in Congress became an activist bunch of instigators – bomb throwers some would say – to President Clinton’s agenda.

The next Congress will probably have similar ratios of Democrats and Republicans as the ‘93 Congress – that is to say, the Democrats will rule the roost with impunity.

But as far as I can tell, this Republican gang lacks two essential ingredients from the ‘93 crowd: Newt Gingrich and an agenda.

Unfortunately for the GOP, what it does have plenty of are factions and people ready to lead those factions.

There’s Mitt Romney, who was endorsed by National Review before the Republican primaries started and seen by many at the time as the only candidate capable of saving the party from McCain-ism. There’s Mike Huckabe, who leads the most unabashadly religious segment of social conservatives within the party. There’s Bobby Jindal, who has earned some of his own social conservative bona fides as Governor of Louisiana. Radiating out from that core, you’ve got people like Florida Governor Charlie Crist, South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford (one of the few prominent Republicans to take a stand against the bailout), there’s Sarah Palin, although the likely defeat of the McCain/Palin ticket in November, combined with her own bad press clippings, is likely to make her 2012’s version of Dan Quayle and, yes, there’s even Ron Paul — for all his faults, he tapped into an underlying core of libertarianism that the Republican party would be incredibly foolish to ignore.

But there’s no Ronald Reagan that can unite all this disparate factions, and no Newt Gingrich who can bring them together to create a winning agenda.

As Nick notes, there’s a pretty good reason for that:

[T]he conservative movement is in shambles. Part of President Bush’s ruinous legacy will be his gutting of conservative philosophy in pursuit of his own misguided and myopic agenda. The net result: we’re all big government conservatives now.

It’s not just that conservatives are bereft of ideas — parties and movements run dry on ideas every now and again. It’s that they’re confused by ideas. They no longer know which are the right ideas; which are their ideas; which ideas represent conservative philosophy. President Bush has effectively mated conservative philosophy with virulent social engineering to create something that nobody likes but that conservatives now own.

They need to shed Bush’s legacy like a snake sheds its skin and grow a new one.  In a hurry.  With a Gingrich and an agenda nearby.

That’s not going to be easy, though, especially with the likes of blowhards like Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, and Michael Savage screaming in the ears of rank-and-file Republicans on a daily basis for the next four years.

This much is clear, though. if the GOP draws the wrong conclusions from what is shaping up to be an overwhelming and emphatic electoral defeat in sixteen days, then it will simply set itself up to repeat those mistakes over and over again.