A GOP Bridge to Nowhere

By Eugene Robinson
WashPost
Tuesday, November 11, 2008

I could make the argument that all is not lost for the Republican Party -- that last Tuesday's across-the-board defeat wasn't an unmitigated disaster. But it would be a pretty dumb argument, and I doubt many readers would take it seriously. The truth is that the Grand Old Party is on a Bridge to Nowhere and may have great difficulty changing course.

The essential problem is that changing course will require turning around and marching, if not sprinting, in the opposite direction. At least initially, this doesn't look like something enough Republicans are willing to do.

What we're hearing instead from Republican politicians, pollsters and pundits is reassurance that the United States is a "center-right nation" with an innate distrust of progressive policies. The problem, these soothing voices say, is that under George W. Bush the GOP strayed from its basic philosophy of limited government and adopted the big-spending habits of the Democrats. Republicans need to rediscover their bedrock principles, this theory goes, and after a few years of rule by Barack Obama and his Democratic enablers on Capitol Hill, voters will come running home to papa.

So much is wrong with this analysis that it's hard to know where to begin. Let's start with the basic premise, that of a center-right American polity. To the extent that such a vague label has any real meaning, that may once have been the case. But if ours were a center-right electorate now, one imagines it might have been kinder to a center-right politician such as John McCain.

(More here.)