Conventional Wisdom

As I listen to Senator Barack Obama's acceptance speech at Invesco Field in Denver, Colorado, the thought that crisscrosses my mind is my wish that John McCain had won the Republican nomination for president in 2000.

Had Republicans had the sense to give McCain that victory, hopefully followed by a McCain win in the general election, I strongly suspect that Barack Obama would not now have the opportunity to score easy points against his Republican opponent--whoever that opponent would have been--by stating simply that the latter had voted with the incumbent president ninety percent of the time, for even if that statistic were true, it would not have been such a political liability. Obama's fellow Democrats could not have lambasted the GOP for exacerbating the federal budget deficit and national debt, for a President McCain would not likely have pushed through unnecessary tax cuts, signed a massive new entitlement program into law and allowed federal spending to spiral out of control, as the current occupant of the White House has. Obama would not have been able to push his Iraq withdrawal strategy on the back of the success of the troop surge, either because the surge would have come at the time it should have--during the initial invasion of Iraq--or because, as I suspect, a President McCain might not have invaded Iraq at all.

Had Republicans not put their party's reins into the hands of a swaggering simpleton, they would not have handed the Democrats an opportunity to defeat the GOP candidate simply by associating him with the current president. Had they not relied on kneejerk cultural conservatism and gung-ho jingoism to narrowly win elections, then stupidly predict a "permanent majority" for their party, they would not have unwittingly placed a political parvenu with barely any governing experience and zero legislative achievements to speak of within spitting distance of the presidency. Had they done a better job of choosing their battles abroad--avoiding biting off more foreign wars than they could chew--and of adhering to true small-government conservative principles at home, they would not have put the Grand Old Party's faithful in a position in which they simply cannot point to substantial recent accomplishments, or impressive empirical results of their policies, to bolster their candidate's claim to the White House.

This is why I cannot wait to hear what the heirs to Abraham Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, Dwight Eisenhower and Ronald Reagan plan to offer American voters at the Republican convention next week. Frankly, I am dreading the spectacle. This president's on-the-job performance has been abysmal in almost every respect, and those ideas of his administration that were arguably sound in theory, he has executed with the most atrocious incompetence. He has left his party's congressional cohort in tatters; even with the current Democratic Congress' subterranean approval ratings--less than half the president's, if that can be believed--the Dems are still expected to reinforce their grip on both houses of the nation's legislature this November. He has left conservative principles discredited in the eyes of most ordinary Americans, at least for the time being. He has robbed his partisans of any chance of regaining political advantage in the foreseeable future. He has left them in a position in which only the party's most notorious maverick would have made a viable presidential candidate--in which the Republican nominee's only hope in hell of winning this election depends on treating his own party's leader like a leper escaped from the colony.

Poor Republicans. What are they to do in such chilly climate? I, for one, suggest they take advantage of their current (and quite well-deserved) spell in the penalty box to train the new generation of rising stars in the party--the Jindals, the Sanfords, and the rest--for future leadership, wise leadership of the kind that will not leave the GOP so humiliated and disgraced in Americans' eyes ever again.

They must confront the increasing economic inequality in American society, the difficulties faced by the middle class and their disenchantment with Republican doctrine--face up to these issues and address them with coherent policies to combat them. They must discover new and innovative means of reducing the size and spending of the federal government--without abdicating Washington's basic social responsibilities to the people--before cutting taxes, rather than choking off crucial revenue streams while borrowing Chinese renminbi to make up the shortfall.

They must develop policies to empower Americans to bounce back from economic tribulations and adapt to economic evolution, rather than shielding them from global competition or propping them up in ways that diminish their incentives to work. They must find ways to rein in avaricious corporate executives and reckless Wall Street moneylenders, preventing them from bleeding their workers dry or derailing the economy without penalizing the entrepreneurial elan on which any society's prosperity is truly built. And they must learn how to wield American wealth and power more prudently and shrewdly on the world stage while continuing the tough work of gradually setting more and more captive peoples free, and without rewarding unscrupulous global actors (both state and non-state) for the dirt they do or sacrificing America's security on the altar of internationalism.

Quite the mouthful, this laundry list. Yet it is only a taste of the Herculean task that awaits today's beleaguered Republicans. If the party that abolished slavery and defeated the Soviet Union is to redeem itself from its current dishonor, then the sooner it begins the 21st-century overhaul it so desperately needs, the better.