Party like it's 1980!

First hubris; now, nemesis. Peggy Noonan wails and gnashes her teeth over the moribund state of the Republican Party. I know just how she feels. Excerpts:

They are also – Hill leaders, lobbyists, party speakers – successful, well-connected, busy and rich. They never guessed, back in '86, how government would pay off! They didn't know they'd stay! They came to make a difference and wound up with their butts in the butter. But affluence detaches, and in time skews thinking. It gives you the illusion you're safe, and that everyone else is. A party can lose its gut this way.

Many are ambivalent, deep inside, about the decisions made the past seven years in the White House. But they've publicly supported it so long they think they . . . support it. They get confused. Late at night they toss and turn in the antique mahogany sleigh bed in the carpeted house in McLean and try to remember what it is they really do think, and what those thoughts imply.

And those are the bright ones. The rest are in Perpetual 1980: We have the country, the troops will rally in the fall.

Boy, is that ever true. As I was listening to the new Dallas County GOP leader speak yesterday in the editorial board meeting, I thought about what a bubble so many of us in conservative media live in. If all you listened to was right-wing talk radio and suchlike, you wouldn't necessarily see how much the country has changed. I've written before about the depressing epiphany I had two years ago at a conservative dinner event here in Dallas, when someone from the audience asked panelists about prospects for conservatives, and Phyllis Schlafly started banging on again about judges and public schools. It wasn't even that I much disagreed with her as it was a feeling of, "That's it? That's all you got?"

Think how long it took the Democrats after 1980 to understand how fundamentally the country had changed, right out from under them. Think about how long they continued mouthing their moldy mantras, to decreasing effect, before they finally hit bottom and realized they had to change. It could be a long period in the cold for Republicans.

(And again, this is why I really don't want to hear a *&#% word about gay marriage from Republicans this fall. I am not willing to be played by these jerks again. If they can't pass out of a Republican-controlled Senate a marriage amendment, and if a conservative Evangelical Republican president couldn't be bothered to advocate for it, despite the fact that he'd just been re-elected, and people still liked him then, then it's never going to pass. That ship has sailed. If they want to talk about passing a constitutional amendment amplifying the First Amendment's protection of religious freedom to explicitly shield religious organizations from discrimination resulting from gay civil rights laws, fine, they've got my ear again. More on which later.)

More Noonan:

But this week a House Republican said publicly what many say privately, that there is another truth. "Members and pundits . . . fail to understand the deep seated antipathy toward the president, the war, gas prices, the economy, foreclosures," said Rep. Tom Davis of Virginia in a 20-page memo to House GOP leaders.

The party, Mr. Davis told me, is "an airplane flying right into a mountain." Analyses of its predicament reflect an "investment in the Bush presidency," but "the public has just moved so far past that." "Our leaders go up to the second floor of the White House and they get a case of White House-itis." Mr. Bush has left the party at a disadvantage in terms of communications: "He can't articulate. The only asset we have now is the big microphone, and he swallowed it." The party, said Mr. Davis, must admit its predicament, act independently of the White House, and force Democrats to define themselves. "They should have some ownership for what's going on. They control the budget. They pay no price. . . . Obama has all happy talk, but it's from 30,000 feet. Energy, immigration, what is he gonna do?"

This is all true, as far as it goes. Maybe I'm just dense, but I really don't see that the Democrats are so full of big, bright new ideas. The truth is, they don't have to be. It is enough this year not to be Republican. People are sick of Republicans, who have run the country into the ditch, chiefly in Iraq. I don't blame them. There is such a thing as accountability, or should be.

But the idea that at this late date lickspittle Congressional Republicans could actually grow a collective pair of -- er, grow a spine -- and stand up to this lame-duck, spectacularly unpopular president, when they almost never have taken him on in the name of principle or even self-preservation? Please. It is to laugh.

The second Bush term has given them ample opportunity to stand up to the president. But that would have required independent thinking and loyalty to principle. As Noonan puts it:

Mr. Bush has squandered the hard-built paternity of 40 years. But so has the party, and so have its leaders. If they had pushed away for serious reasons, they could have separated the party's fortunes from the president's. This would have left a painfully broken party, but they wouldn't be left with a ruined "brand," as they all say, speaking the language of marketing. And they speak that language because they are marketers, not thinkers. Not serious about policy. Not serious about ideas. And not serious about leadership, only followership.

One last thing: Many Republicans note that the Democrats have the power of Obama's charisma to sell themselves this fall, putting Republicans, who lack a figure of similar power, at a big disadvantage. That's true too; if any other Democratic politician were running on Obama's liberal record, and his platform, it'd be a different race. But so what? When Ronald Reagan won in 1980, it wasn't because America woke up one day and decided that it was conservative. It was because most people were sick and tired of Democratic Party misgovernment, and wanted a change for the better. Reagan was the change they were waiting for.

And I tell you, as late as 1984, the country still wasn't with Reagan on many key issues (I know this, because I was a senior in high school campaigning for Walter Mondale, and I was deeply frustrated that polls showed voters taking Democratic positions on the issues, but strongly with Reagan all the same). Reagan won the nation's confidence, and eventually won the nation to Reaganism. Now, Reaganism for the most part worked. Will whatever Obama is selling work? I doubt it, but we may well see. The point is, if he wins the White House, Obama could use his considerable powers of charisma to move the country substantially to the left as Reagan moved it to the right. I remember in the 1980s all the liberal commentariat bitching and moaning about how Reagan bamboozled and hoodwinked voters. What did all that amount to? Dogs barking, while the caravan of American politics moved on.

It took a very long time for the liberal commentariat and the Democratic Party to come to grips with the fact that they'd lost the people. Mired in self-pity, self-justification and hatred of the Other, they couldn't grasp the reality of the miserable situation they'd created for themselves. I hope it doesn't take the conservative commentariat nearly as long to come to the same conclusion.