Schools Of Thought

There is the usual and expected – heck, it's inevitable – soul searching and finger pointing going on in the Republican party and among those who lean to the right. Two major schools of thought are becoming evident early. In one, people are arguing that the Republican loss was a result of moving away from the center and becoming too conservative. The other is the mirror image of course; the Republicans abandoned too much of their conservative principles and tried to pander too much to the middle. George Will, predictably, is in the latter camp.

At least Republicans now know where the "Bridge to Nowhere" leads: to the political wilderness. But there are three reasons for conservatives to temper their despondency.

First, they were punished not for pursuing but for forgetting conservatism. Second, they admire market rationality, and the political market has worked. Third, on various important fronts, conservatism continued its advance Tuesday.

Of course the election-turning issue was not that $223 million bridge in Alaska or even the vice of which it is emblematic — incontinent spending by a Republican-controlled Congress trying to purchase permanent power. Crass spending (the farm and highway bills, the nearly eightfold increase in the number of earmarks since 1994) and other pandering (e.g., the Terri Schiavo intervention) have intensified as Republicans' memories of why they originally sought power have faded.

But Republicans sank beneath the weight of Iraq, the lesson of which is patent: Wars of choice should be won swiftly rather than lost protractedly. On election eve the president, perhaps thinking one should not tinker with success, promised that his secretary of defense would remain. That promise perished yesterday as a result of Tuesday's repudiation of Republican stewardship, which, although emphatic, was not inordinate, considering the offense that provoked it — war leadership even worse than during the War of 1812.

Read it all, but really there are no new arguments here. Will has long been a war critic and sees it through that lens. What's interesting to me about the elections is how many of the Democratic candidates won by running to the right. That should be a lesson for the Republicans.