Strange irony of the political punditry today: Nobody, but nobody, has been tougher on the GOP than the gang at The American Conservative. Here's Daniel Larison on what the Republicans will learn from their loss this fall:
The GOP’s predicament is that it is mostly running on nothing, or at
least nothing that isn’t a rehash of Bush-era policies. That could make
it much easier for movement conservatives to conclude that the lesson of
the election is that Republican candidates need to be more explicitly
ideological, which in practice will mean that there will be even less
interest in reviewing where the party may have gone wrong. As much as
critics of the Ryan plan would like to link the campaign to it, it is
going to have many more defenders after the election insisting that the
campaign never seriously made use of Ryan or the plan. If Romney’s
campaign is a reflection of the party’s failings, it becomes all the
more important for the rest of the party to pin the blame for a 2012
loss on Romney alone. Just as movement conservatives threw up their
hands after the 2006 drubbing and said, “The Republican Party failed us,
it has nothing to do with us,” Republicans will throw up their hands
and say that Romney failed them and they are not responsible.
Brutal — and probably true.
Kit Stolz 