Frum's counsel

David Frum's post about the crop of GOP presidential hopefuls is getting a lot of deserved attention. He makes a brief case that the GOP field is objectively one of the best we've had in ages -- but that the lot are running lackluster campaigns. And then:

But as much as I blame the candidates, I have to blame the party too. Have Republicans absorbed how much trouble their party is in? To the (limited) extent that we do, we tend to to attribute everything to Iraq — as if Katrina, the Schiavo affair, corruption in Congress, and the intensifying irrelevance of our domestic-policy agenda did not exist. And so we demand from our candidates ever more fervent declarations of fealty to an ideology that interests an ever dwindling proportion of the public.

I wish somebody at the Reagan Library had said: "Ronald Reagan was a great leader and a great president because he addressed the problems of his time. But we have very different problems — and we need very different answers. Here are mine."

But if one of the candidates had said that, would we have hearkened? Or would we say: The path to the nomination will be crossed by the candidate who does the best job of ticking the boxes of a coalition that probably now spans no more than 30 percent of the electorate?

Frum's onto something. We Republicans have gotten so politically correct about our issues that we've made it very difficult for our candidates to step outside the narrow constraints we've constructed for them. A few years ago, when I was reporting on the social and political conditions in Holland that paved the way for liberalism's conquest of that once-conservative country, historians and others told me that after the Second World War, the country tried to reconstitute itself according to its old pillarization system. But the people had lost faith in it, and just went through the motions. When the counterculture winds started to blow in the 1960s, the old order thoroughly collapsed from internal weakness. People had been going through the motions for so long, paying ritual obeisance to an outmoded political and social structure, that they simply walked away from it at the first real opportunity.

I wonder: is the GOP going through a similar collapse from internal ossification, and a concomitant insistence on unity above principle, and creative intellectual ferment? When I posted yesterday that a group of Republican Congressmen had gone to the White House to tell the president that they'd pretty much had it on Iraq, someone went to the comboxes and called these members RINOs (Republicans In Name Only). That's exactly the kind of thinking that's helped shipwreck the GOP, and made it difficult for the party and its leaders to adapt to changing circumstances. Burke said that a willingness to change is the means by which any society conserves the things that matter most to it. Any movement, and any party, that wants to maintain its relevance has to rethink its principles as they apply to changing times. That's not to say abandon its principles, but we've got to realize that a political party is not the custodian of revealed religion.

I don't agree that Iraq is only part of the GOP candidates' problems this year. Absent the war, the Republican field would have serious problems dealing with the legacy of the GOP Congress's spending, as well as exhaustion with eight years of Bush (though to be fair, it's impossible to know how the Bush administration would have turned out absent the war). But Iraq looms so very large that I don't see how any of the candidates can overcome it. The hardcore GOP primary voters have not gone south on the war, so any candidate that breaks from Bushian war orthodoxy in any serious way likely dooms his candidacy. But it's unthinkable that he could hope to go into the general election backing the war and hope to win. I'm sure that I'm one of a vanishingly small minority of Republicans who simply can't (at this point) foresee voting for any of these candidates, because of their support of the war, and of Bush's foreign policy in general.

So when Frum says:

If we want to win, we have to offer the American voter something fresh and compelling. I think most of us understand that. And yet at the same time we are demanding that our candidates repeat formulas and phrases from two and three decades ago.

...I think he's exactly right. Yet unless these candidates are willing to cross Bush on the war, it's hard for me to think of anything "fresh and compelling" they might say that would appeal to me. I know I'm an atypical GOP primary voter, but I'm not an atypical American voter in this regard. If those GOP primary voters actually want to win in 2008, they've got to realize how out of touch they are with the broader electorate, and find a candidate who would be a reasonable compromise. Like Frum, I don't know if the GOP primary voters are capable of understanding the trouble the party is in, and opening up some room for the candidates we actually have to stake out some risky ground. I wouldn't vote for Giuliani for several reasons, but I applaud his willingness to quit being a mushmouth fake on abortion, and actually to stick up for what he really believes in -- abortion rights. I of course believe he's very wrong on this issue, but if he's willing to take a bold risk, it might just fire up the other guys to do the same on other issues. At this point, it's hard to see what they have to lose.