Party Poopers

George F. Will and Jonah Goldberg represent two generations of the Republican Party: the staid patrician, secure in his bow tie pedantry like a tenured college professor; and the sloppily-dressed frat boy with Cheeto crumbs trailing down his "No Fat Chicks" t-shirt and a trust fund to pay for the Bimmer. Mr. Will's idea of a good time is cocktails and canapes from Dean and Deluca discussing supply-side economics and the merits of anti-trust legislation as it effects baseball, all to the tune of a Haydn string quartet; Jonah's dream party is a kegger where the jocks actually think he's cool, the chicks dig him, and Radiohead is on the CD player. Today both of them look at what's happening to the GOP in the presidential campaign, what it means for their prospects in November, and the future of the party beyond the election.

First up is Mr. Will, who crunches the numbers like a hard-core accountant.

The first year of the 2008 campaign -- think about that -- has clearly established that the Republican Party's prospects are cloudy. In the first two major contests, Mike Huckabee has finished first and third, John McCain fourth and first, Mitt Romney second twice. Rudy Giuliani has been treading water, waiting for Florida, which on Jan. 29 will allocate more convention delegates (114) than Iowa, Wyoming and New Hampshire combined (92). So, clinging to clichés as to a lifeline, Republicans congratulate themselves on how evenly the party's strengths, such as they are, are spread among their candidates.

But although only one-third of 1 percent of the national electorate -- those who have participated in the Iowa, Wyoming and New Hampshire nominating events -- have spoken, the Democrats have even more reason than they did three weeks ago to look forward to a rollicking November. Realistic Republicans are looking for shelter.

Nov. 4 could be their most disagreeable day since Nov. 3, 1964. Actually, this November could be even worse, because in 1964 Barry Goldwater's loss of 44 states served a purpose, the ideological reorientation and revitalization of the party. Which Republican candidate this year could produce a similarly constructive loss?

Today, all the usual indicators are dismal for Republicans. If that broad assertion seems counterintuitive, produce a counterexample. The adverse indicators include: shifts in voters' identifications with the two parties (Democrats now 50 percent, Republicans 36 percent); the tendency of independents (they favored Democratic candidates by 18 points in 2006); the fact that Democrats hold a majority of congressional seats in states with 303 electoral votes; the Democrats' strength and the Republicans' relative weakness in fundraising; the percentage of Americans who think the country is on the "wrong track"; the Republicans' enthusiasm deficit relative to Democrats' embrace of Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, one of whom will be nominated.

[...]

Republicans should try to choose the next president. They cannot avoid choosing how their party will define itself, even if by a loss beneath a worthy banner.

He has a lot more numbers and statistics to prove his point, but the bottom line -- to coin a phrase -- is that the Republicans are in deep trouble because they cannot make up their mind as to what the party represents any more. Their campaign slogan might as well be "Grab a Paddle," because they know what creek they're up.

Mr. Will spoke of "clinging to clichés as to a lifeline." To prove that point, welcome to the Jonah Goldberg Cliché Festival:

Well, this wasn't the plan.

As pretty much everyone has noticed, the Republican race hasn't exactly followed any of the scripts laid out for it. Mitt Romney has been hacked apart like the Black Knight in "Monty Python and the Holy Grail." John McCain's fortunes - which had been bouncing up and down like a printout of Dick Cheney's EKG - have suddenly spiked northward after his victory in New Hampshire. Fred Thompson ran a brilliant "testing the waters" campaign from his front porch, but when he tried to walk on the water, he sank like a basset hound trying to swim. Pushing the poor beast under the waves was Mike Huckabee, whose down-home folksiness makes Thompson look like David Niven.

Huckabee's surprise surge in Iowa has made him this season's pitchfork populist, albeit a much nicer one - sort of a Disneyland Pat Buchanan. Then there's Ron Paul. He started out as the designated wack job, then became so successful that the Des Moines Register had to cast Alan Keyes in the role of hopeless firebrand wingnut for a brief campaign cameo. And it's a sign of how poorly Rudy Giuliani - once the indisputable front-runner - has done that I'm now mentioning him only after Paul.

Of course, this could all change with the next contest.

Much of this chaos is attributable to the fact that this is a very flawed field, or at least one ill-suited for the times we're in. If a camel is a horse designed by committee, then this year's Republican field looks downright dromedarian. This slate of candidates has everything a conservative designer could want - foreign policy oomph, business acumen, Southern charm, Big Apple chutzpah, religious conviction, outsider zeal, even libertarian ardor - but all so poorly distributed. As National Review put it in its editorial endorsement of Romney (I am undecided, for the record): "Each of the men running for the Republican nomination has strengths, and none has everything - all the traits, all the positions - we are looking for."

But conservatives should contemplate the possibility that the fault lies less in the stars - or the candidates - than in ourselves. Conservatism, quite simply, is a mess these days. Conservative attitudes are changing. Or, more accurately, the attitudes of people who call themselves conservatives are changing.

[...]

There are important differences - on national security, the role of government, religion - among the different brands of conservatism bubbling up. But none of them necessarily reflects the views of the pro-government and social conservative rank and file. The center of the right does not hold, and so we see an army with many flags and many generals and nobody knows who goes with which.

In other words, there's a huge crowd of self-described conservatives standing around the Republican elephant shouting "Do something!" But what they want the poor beast to do is very unclear. And it doesn't take an expert in pachyderm psychology to know that if a big enough mob shouts at an elephant long enough, the most likely result will be a mindless stampede ¿ in this case, either to general election defeat or to disastrously unconservative policies, or both.

The traditional conservative believes that if you don't have a good idea for what an elephant should be doing, the best course is to encourage it to do nothing at all. Alas, the chorus shouting, "Don't just do something, stand there!" shrinks by the day.

What Mr. Goldberg doesn't seem to realize (and Mr. Will, to his credit, does) is that arguing about what kind of conservatism the GOP should advocate is a lot like the guys at Ford in 1959 fighting over which models of the Edsel to promote in 1960. The voters are turning away from the Republicans in record numbers. A lot of it has to do with the current administration and the never-ending list of errors, both tragic and comic, and their practice of politics trumping government. And, as Mr. Goldberg notes, the GOP is discovering that voters actually want competent government services like FEMA and Medicare and don't think that illegal immigrants should be rounded up and deported as a matter of course. In other words, the Democrats might be on to something with all that talk about getting health care to everyone, funding education, and minding their own business when it comes to gay marriage and a woman's right to control the functions of her own body.

What is surprising is that both Mr. Will and Mr. Goldberg lay the fault for this impending doom for the party squarely at the feet of the Republicans themselves. There are no claims of Democratic perfidy or conspiracy theories about the witchcraft* of Hillary Clinton and the middle name of Barack Obama. Rest assured that such dispassionate introspection on the part of the right wing will not be tolerated much longer.

*The use of the term "witchcraft" is not an accident. I've been getting spam e-mails claiming that Hillary Clinton has been casting spells over her opponents since her years in Arkansas.

Cross-posted.