The Debatable Land

The Perils of Punditry

Thinking about recent posts on the Republican party's problems prompted this mildly disconcerting thought:

So, isn't it just a little too convenient that the Republican party might be able to solve some of its problems if only it were inclined to view matters in much the same way you do? That is if it were, shall we say, more "relaxed" about gay marriage and more open to some kind of comprehensive immigration settlement? That's an audacious claim, ain't it? The problem with the party is that it panders to all these other people rather than to people like you. What gives you - a foreigner to boot - the right to be quite so presumptious?

It's a fair question, guv. No doubt about that. And one that I'd suggest all commentators (on any political subject) ought to ask themselves from time to time. Clearly, there's no guarantee that a more centrist, sensitive, nuanced conservatism would prevail even though I do think the GOP needs to rethink its approach as well as some of its policies.

However, you can also make a case for arguing that the GOP has not, despite being in the ascendancy, been quite as successful as is often imagined. True the party has held the White House for 20 of the past 28 years, but it's also the case that since 1988 the Republican nominee has only once (and even then narrowly) prevailed in the popular vote. 

Perhaps, you might say, that's cherry-picking a stat and you might well be correct. Nonetheless, the only GOP victory (in the popular vote) in the last 20 years came in a) a quasi-khaki election and against b) a hapless doofus of a Democratic candidate. Beating John Kerry doesn't prove much. The United States may well be a centre-right nation in relation to other countries, but recently it hasn't been voting as a centre-right nation in American terms. And of course for most of the past half century, the Democrats have also controlled the House of Representatives. Sure, Bush scored a draw with Gore in 2000, but he did so by outperforming expectations and, absent Lewinsky and Gore's own foolishness*, would surely have been defeated.

Just as the purest liberalism is a minority taste, so too is whiter than white conservatism. And at the moment the longer-term demographic trends offer scant encouragement to a party that is increasingly perceived, not altogether inaccurately, as being white, male, elderly and religious. Of course, you need to look after your base but you also need to realise that the base is not enough. Unless it can improve its performance amongst "minority" voters then the GOP will need to do better and better amongst white voters even as those voters constitute an ever shrinking percentage of the electorate. In the long run that seems an unsustainable position. Yes, there may be some victories along the way but, as matters stand (they could change!), they're unlikely to be much more than exceptions to a general trend...

Obviously the GOP doesn't need to build a policy platform just to please me (that might also be electoral suicide!) but, again as matters stand, it's running against the grain not with it. That's a tough and dangerous spot for any political party.

*Another peril of punditry: assuming that the vanquished party was, and was always going to be, useless. Still, the list of defeated Democrats in recent years (Mondale, Dukakis, Gore, Kerry) is hardly impressive. In fact, the defeated Republicans (Bush Sr, Dole, McCain) is, I'd hazard, more impressive than the list of losing Democrats. This might suggest that Democrats can't win when they choose a poor candidate but that even a decent, more or less aceeptable Republican can't be guaranteed victory. Or it might suggest something else. Or nothing!

George W Bush and Immigration

George W Bush seems to agree with me. This isn't as alarming as it might sound. Here's some of what the President had to say at his final press conference this morning:

I am concerned that, in the wake of the defeat, that the temptation will be to look inward and to say, well, here's a litmus test you must adhere to.

This party will come back. But the party's message has got to be that different points of view are included in the party. And -- take, for example, the immigration debate. That's obviously a highly contentious issue. And the problem with the outcome of the initial round of the debate was that some people said, well, Republicans don't like immigrants. Now, that may be fair or unfair, but that's what -- that's the image that came out.

And, you know, if the image is we don't like immigrants, then there's probably somebody else out there saying, well, if they don't like the immigrants, they probably don't like me, as well. And so my point was, is that our party has got to be compassionate and broad-minded.

Quite so. Now it's true that immigration reform is a tough subject for conservatives. True too, that when it comes to immigration there are some many on the restrictionist wing who consider Bush to be either a) a sentimentalist or b) corporate America's pawn or c) both of the above. Equally, the orthodox Republican position on immigration  - border enforcement first, then reform - is not desperately unpopular. But a popular (or at least not unpopular) position is only half of the matter: you have to sell it well too. And on a subject as contentious as immigration, that requires a degree of tact and sophistication that, by and large, seems alien to many Congressional and grass-roots Republicans.

Immigration reform isn't just a matter of courting the hispanic vote either. It's about white votes too, particularly college-educated, middle-class white votes. Pretty much every American under 35 has been educated in a system that is extraordinarily sensitive to racial issues; they are well-attuned to the nuances of language when race is discussed. They understand the code. Republicans too often seem to forget this. When they talk about immigration, they do so in tones that too often seem brutish, narrow and exclusionary. And this costs them support from voters* who might actually agree with the essence of the GOP position, but balk at signing on to it because of the way it is expressed.

So it isn't just that legal Hispanic immigrants might be turned off by the GOP's language on immigration, so too are educated, upscale white voters who don't like the idea of endorsing a party that gives the impression, unwittingly or not, of being hostile to immigration. The GOP's posture on immigration fosters the impression, fairly or not, that they're the "nasty party". As far as political branding goes, that's a toxic position for any party to find itself in. 

It's a shame, then, that Bush was never really in a position to make a real push for real immigration reform. That, like so much of his domestic agenda, was another victim of 9/11 and the resulting foreign policy distractions. This in turn persuaded Karl Rove to run negative campaigns in 2002 and 2004 that, by retreating to the base, abandoned any hope the GOP might once have had of expanding its support amongst Hispanic and black voters (though Bush did win 11% of the black vote in 2004, up from 9% in 2000, if I recall correctly). That was a perfectly sensible ploy in the short-term, but it hasn't done the GOP many favours in the longer-term. No surprise then that Bush's verdict on the Clinton years  -"So much promise, to so little purpose" - also applies to much of his own Presidency. 

*But what about working-class white voters? Ah, yes, that's a different matter entirely, worthy of consideration some other time.

UPDATE: See Weigel for the kind of thinking that will lead has led the GOP to ruin.

[Hat-tips: Dana Goldstein and MPG&S]

Et Tu Grover?

Granted, no-one in their right mind would choose Michelle Malkin as a political standard-bearer. Or gate-keeper for that matter. Nonetheless, there is the awkward fact that she's extremely popular amongst a certain class of American conservative. I've already suggested that organisations such as the Club for Growth and Americans for Tax Reform are just as much a part of the conservative problem as they are likely to contribute to any solution. Frighteningly Michelle Malkin agrees with me; thankfully her reasoning is different. The problem with Grover Norquist, you see, is that he's insufficiently right-wing. No, really.

Which brings us back to Grover Norquist and the unpleasant realities that these strategists and rebranding gurus and RNC candidates don’t want to talk about.

Party power player Norquist and the ATR propose to help fix the GOP’s problems.

Norquist is part of the problem.

Some of us have not forgotten how Norquist made common cause with the left-wing zealots at People for the American Way in a forum bashing the Patriot Act — and how he forged even more dangerous alliances in the name of Muslim GOP outreach.

Awe-inspiring in a way. Also, of course, insane.

The Limits of Reaganism

At a recent debate, every single one of the candidates hoping to be the nest chairman of the Republican National Committee named Ronald Reagan as their favourite Republican president. In one sense this is hardly surprising, given the extent to which the Cult of Reagan - or more precisely, the Cult of the Idea of Reagan - has come to define the Republican party; still, Kevin Drum wonders why no-one dare stick their neck out and admit to admiring some other GOP luminary.

As Kevin notes, it is striking how many Republican presidents have been expelled from the Conservative canon. Eisenhower, Ford and George HW Bush are viewed with suspicion as "Republicans in Name Only," Nixon was a closet liberal too and, like Harding, a crook to boot. Teddy Roosevelt, for all that many Republicans admire his muscular brio, scarcely fits the modern conservative ideal and it remains, sadly, rather infra dig to admit an admiration for Calvin Coolidge. So Reagan it is and must be.

But the Cult of Reagan actually helps explain the mess the Republican movement finds itself in. It used to be that it was the left that specialised in writing dissenters out of the movement; these days, in America at least, that's become a conservative trait. The RNC debate was illuminating in this respect: in addition to passing the Reagan litmus tests candidates were asked how many guns they own. And that was more or less it. Tick those boxes and you're a proper Republican; waver on either question and you're subject to suspicion.

It's this sort of blinkered thinking, this elevation of ideology above the messy business of winning elections that has helped condemn the GOP to minority status. A two party system in a nation of 300m people demands that each party be a broad church. Reagan recognised this; his successors seem to have forgotten it.

Like Thatcherism in Britain, the Reagan revolution began as an internal insurgency that caught the party grandees by surprise. Neither was really supposed to win but desperate times demanded desperate measures. If external crisis and malaise helped them win the leadership against the odds, then subsequently they were fortunate in their enemies: Carter and Callaghan first, then Mondale and Foot. In each case, Thatcher and Reagan were looking to a revived future as their opponents seemed stuck in a dismal, best-forgotten past.

But it is an iron truth of politics that prolonged success sows the seeds of future downfall. Revolutions run out of steam. They cannot be permanent. More damagingly still, what begins as an unorthodox and surprisingly successful approach calcifies into a stubborn orthodoxy that brooks no dissent, even as times and circumstances change. The path to power is built upon compromise and flexibility: Thatcher always knew what she wanted to do, but she was also aware, in her early years, of how limited her room for manoevre was - not least because not everyone in her cabinet was on board. If progress was slower than she liked, it was also steadier than when, after 1987, she reigned supreme and hubris began to take its fatal grip. Similarly, Reagan was a vastly more adaptable President than current conservative folklore might have you believe.

In that sense, then. the troubles of Republicanism now and of the Tories in the last 15 years, were built upon their previous successes. The difficulty is that the second (or third) generation is rarely as talented or adaptable as the trailblazers who won power in the first place. Instead of finding fresh ideas and solutions, they inherit positions and prejudices that, because they worked once before, are assumed to be eternal truths rather than particular answers to particular problems at a particular time.

And because they're seen as eternal truths, any deviation from them is grounds for heresy. Thus, for instance, the Club for Growth would, it sometimes seems, rather see a Democrt in Congress than a "bad" Republican. Fair enough, they've got their wish and the GOP is a minority party in both houses of Congress. It's not all the Club for Growth's fault, of course, but the narrowness of their (fiscal) vision is parallelled by other forces within contemporary conservatism that have left the party older and whiter and more religious than America as a whole. In other words, the GOP is increasingly out of step with a changing America.

Witness, for instance, the party's hostility to gay marriage. That plays well with the base, but it's not something that's likely to endear it to the political future. It's a symbolic issue in some ways, but each year plenty of voters who agree with the GOP die while plenty more who don't are added to the electoral roll.

Style matters too. The Tory position on Europe in the 1990s (and on immigration and crime more recently) was more popular with the electorate than were Labour's policies, but the stridency and, to many, the ugly tone in which the Tories expressed themselves turned many voters off. Similarly, the GOP position on, say, immigration is not without its supporters but the manner in which a position is expressed matters almost as much as the position itself. And the GOP has seemed bitter and parochial - qualities with which the electorate is unlikely to wish to associate itself.

Another example? The Terri Schiavo affair: millions of Americans might have been conflicted as to what they felt in what was a horrid, ugly affair. But they knew they didn't like the spectacle of Congressional Republicans stomping all over the case in hob-nailed boots, abandoning any notion of Congressional restraint, let alone respect for States' Rights and due process. The party that says the other mob always want to interfere abandoned all pretence to principle to interfere itself. Voters can spot hypocrisy and while they may sometimes forgive it if its purusued with a modicum of subtlety or on grounds of expediency, more often they dislike it intensely when it seems a flagrant breach of promise or purpose.

Similarly, there's not too much wrong with wanting to cut taxes, but John McCain's tax plan was absurdly tilted towards the already-wealthy. Yes, the richest contribute an enormous percentage of federal income tax receipts, but "ordinary" working families - those struggling with increasing health insurance bills or rising college costs - could reasonably ask when exactly it was that the Republican party stopped caring about them.

Ironically, George W Bush seemed to recognise this. The talk of "compassionate conservatism" and of an "ownership society" (the latter entirely familiar to Britishers who remember the glory days of Thatcherism) was an effort to recast Republicanism in a fresher, more contemporary mold. Alas, neither really amounted to much, killed by the administration's carelessness, the swamping impact of 9/11 and Karl Rove's determination to bet the farm on militarism and wedge issues  - a strategy that could only move the GOP away from the centre-ground. Such a strategy is fine for winning elections, but less useful for governing. Apart from anything else, abandoning the centre gifts an opportunity to the opposition; just as importantly it's only sustainable in good times or when everything goes well. When the worm turns, you find yourself excluded from the centrist-mainstream. Suddenly politics can seem a lonely, scary place.

Thatcher found this out for herself and it took her party 15 years to recover; so too the GOP today. Comparisons between British and American politics are rarely exact of course, but in each case we see (or saw) a narrowing vision of what conservatism ought to be. Instead of an orchestra of conservatism you have a string quartet: still capable of pretty music, of course, but less versatile, less popular and with fewer tunes to play.

But, as I say, the Idea of Reagan has overtaken the Reaganite reality. Consequently Republicans seem to have misconstrued the premises upon which they based their decision to sanctify Reagan in the first-place. The god they worship is not the god who actually existed. The apparent simplicity of the GOP mantra - strong national defence, tax cuts and, er, that's it - becomes a liability when the party faces an intelligent, charismatic, adaptable opponent who seems better prepared to meet the complex challenges of a complex world right now, not the challenges that faced the United States nearly 30 years ago.

All of which is to say, presumptiously for a furriner perhaps, that the GOP has an awful lot of work to do before it's likely to be ready for government again. Of course, in time the Democrats may over-reach themselves too, but no-one should assume that will happen in just four or even eight years.

Because, you know, when the public tires of the old tunes, it's time to learn some new ones. And I rather doubt whether that old-time Reagan religion is going to be enough.

But you know what? I'd like to know what Messrs Douthat and Salam, among others, have to say on this.

UPDATE: Unseen by me, Mark Thompson was labouring in these same vineyards a couple of days ago.

Transatlantic Differences

There are times when it's good to be away from the hurly-burly of American politics. Doubly so when the subject of gay marriage comes up. Here, for instance, is a story it is hard to imagine happening in the United States: Nick Herbert, the Conservative party's Shadow Justice secretary has apparently become the second member of David Cameron's Shadow Cabinet, to enter into a civil partnership. It's hard to imagine too many senior gay Republicans feeling comfortable doing this, let alone doing so with the blessing of the party's leader and their constituency assosciation.

Then again, gay marriage in Britain has, generally speaking, been decoupled from religion. (Of course, some would say that everything else in Britain has been, so why not marriage too). Now maybe American conservatives (of one degree of religiosity or another) are correct that this sort of thing heralds the end of everything, but if so it's striking how relaxed their British counterparts, for the most part, are about this imminent descent to Sodom.

Best bits? The story of Herbert's marriage was broken by the Sunday Telegraph's diary column. That is to say it's gossip, not news. Better still? Herbert worked for the British Field Sports Society (ie, the fox-hunting and grouse-shooting lobby) for six years before entering parliament. Culturally at least, that organisation is to the Tory party rather what the the National Rifle Association is to the GOP.

On one level this is trivial stuff, but it's a reminder that the Republican party is increasingly out of step with its sister conservative parties around the world. That's not, in itself, necessarily a terrible thing but it ought to be borne in mind next time someone suggests that there are wholly applicable lessons to be drawn from Britain/Canada/Australia/Wherever. (You mean, pieces like this one? Er, yeah.) The fun lies in the differences, not the similarities - even if pundits are necessarily drawn to finding the latter and smoothing over the former.

GOP Future Delayed? Maybe.

Bobby Jindal has fast become the GOP's Great Brown Hope. He keeps demonstrating why. First he said he did not want to be considered as a potential running-mate for John McCain, now he says he won't be running for President in 2012. Sensible laddie. 2016 is time enough. Apart from anything else, he has to be re-elected Governor of Louisiana in 2011 first. Sure, he might change his mind and, sure, Obama may be a very unlucky President, but smart people won't be betting that way. At least, not yet.

One Nation Republicanism?

David Frum is leaving National Review to set up a new online venture called NewMajority.com which will launch once Obama takes the oath of office in January. Frum explains himself here:

Over the past three years, I have been engaged in some intense rethinking of my own conservatism. My fundamental political principles remain the same as ever: free markets, American leadership in the world, and intense attachment to inherited moral and cultural traditions. Yet I cannot be blind to the evidence that we have seen free markets produce some damaging and dangerous results in recent years. Or that the foreign policy I supported has not yielded the success I would have wished to see. Or that traditions must evolve if they are to endure. There are new principles too that must be included in a majority conservatism: environmental protection as a core value and an unwavering insistence upon competence and integrity in government.

This seems quite sensible to me and suggests that, in some respects at least, Frum is edging towards a One Nation Tory view of the future of the GOP. Comparisons between Britain, Canada and the United States can never be exact of course, but, as I've suggested before, this seems a prudent course to take. Certainly, the GOP cannot be saved by those who think it has only endured a minor setback or two that can easily be shrugged off. Eight years of failure have taken a toll; the wise man accepts that this means some things are going to have to change if, in the long-term, they're going to return to being what they were.

Concerned about Obama?

Via Yglesias, here's a charming leaflet from the Republican Jewish Committee that helps demonstrate just why the GOP deserves - even needs - to lose on Tuesday.

Nice touch too, that the photograph used shows Barack Obama speaking in Germany. Obviously Obama is, rather oddly, Adolf Hitler and Neville Chamberlain.

Equally obviously, it scarcely needs saying that Neville Chamberlain was not in fact to blame for the Holocaust.

Department of You Coudn't Make It Up

Not for the first time this year, one has to wonder what question Fred Thompson could possibly be the answer to. K-Lo remains charmingly indefatigable:

Unleashing Fred

Thompson works his magic to get out the vote.

No further comment required.

Limbaugh's Recipe for a Democratic Majority

This won't surprise everyone but it turns out that Rush Limbaugh is an idiot. To wit:

Going after moderates, independents, and all these yokels is not the blueprint.  The blueprint’s there, 1994, taking back the House, the blueprint’s there.  Why are these people ignoring it?

Of course, as Daniel Larison points out, the GOP won in 1994 in large part because it was able to appeal to many more independent voters than it had in 1992. (Clinton's less than stellar first two years in office obviously also helped). As I have suggested, once a party's brand has become contaminated - as was the case with the Tories in the mid-1990s and the GOP now - you cannot simply retreat to first principles and assume that the public will forgive and forget your sins. It doesn't work like that. And, again as the Tories discovered, once the brand has been contaminated the base is no longer enough to win. When the electorate moves, political parties that are truly interested in winning move too.

The concept is not, actually, all that difficult to grasp: to win elections you need to persuade people who did not support you last time out to switch their allegiance this time around. Simply presuming that the electorate has taken leave of its senses and will eventually return to the fold is a recipe for years in opposition. Mind you, talk radio thrives on anger and is, therefore, better suited to opposition than government. So perhaps Limbaugh is simply looking out for himself.

UPDATE: David Frum argues that Limbaugh (and his followers) are leading the GOP "to disaster - and beyond disaster, to irrelevance." 

Lessons from a Tory Revival

At Culture11 today, I've a piece offering, however impertinently, some advice to the Republican party.That is to say, I suggest five lessons they could learn from the Conservatives' revival in Britain. The extent to which they are applicable, let alone replicable, in the United States, may differ of course. But they are notions, not policy prescriptions, broadly summarised as:

1.  The Base is Not Enough
2.  The Elites Matter
3.  So do Ideas
4.  When the Electrate Moves, You Move
5.  Atonement Needs to be More than Rhetoric; Or, Time is Not Enough

Check the rest out here.

Department of Political Wisdom

Michael Brendan Dougherty, splendid as always, brings it:

At the end of the day, the arguments all seem to boil down to something similar: If it were more like me, the Republican Party would be better off. It’s failing because it’s like you.  

(From a while ago, for sure. But it is even more true now.)

McCain and the Ignorance of Crowds

I've been down on John McCain for quite a while (but, heck, so have a lot of people!) but despite the ugliness of his campaign he shows the better side of his nature in this film. Then again, it's hard not to be struck by the boos that greet him. Boos, of course, from audiences of rock-solidly partisan Republican voters. It's hard not to think that people like this bloody deserve to lose:

"Ambition" is the new "Uppity"

Sarah Palin on Barack Obama and Bill Ayers today:

This pattern raises serious questions about Senator Obama's judgment.  It raises serious questions about his truthfulness.  But there is no question about his ambition.

Ambition explains launching your political career in the living room of an unrepentant terrorist.

Indeed. Because you too would start your decades-long conspiracy to steal the Presidency in the home of an "unrepentent terrorist". That's a sensible ambition! Who could possibly fail to see that? Doesn't Obama's association - no more than that - with Ayers undermine the "he's a secret terrorist-sympathiser" narrative? Or have we, I suppose, now reached the point where the GOP skips the "secret" bit and just calls Obama a terrorist who's so cunning he hides his terrorism in plain sight?

There's a bigger problem here. Even if this kind of tactic works an McCain pulls off an improbable victory, the manner of his triumph will poison his victory. There will be no goodwill or groundswell of support from the decent, patriotic middle for a President McCain. By contrast, a President Obama is going to enjoy enormous support and will be given the benefit of the doubt by millions of people who didn't actually vote for him. He will, I rather think, have a prolonged Presidential honeymoon. One that is likely to be extended the more people recall the nature of the desperate campaign he defeated.

And that means that these kinds of tactics, I think, will make the eventual Republican recovery a longer, slower, more painful affair than it would have been had the GOP lost with class and decency.

Home is Where the Heartland Is

Somewhere, Mark Penn is having a terrible day. He must feel like leaning out his office window and screaming, "I told you so, you bloody fools! But would you listen? Would you? No, no you bloody well wouldn't..." Remember the memo he passed around the Clinton campaign on March 19th 2007? You should, because I rather think the Republican party has.

To recap, Penn noted that Obama's campaign for the Democratic party's nomination was supported by four factors: 1. Authenticity, 2. Left/Right appeal, 3. [Being] Black,  4. New and fresh. That was true then and it remains true today. But Penn also saw four weaknesses: 1. Lack of experience, 2. Lack of American roots, 3. Removed from working man/woman, 4. Phony/Just another politician. A good deal of this was also true then and some of it remains so today.

Penn then advised Clinton that:

His roots to basic American values and culture are at best limited. I cannot imagine America electing a president during a time of war who is not at his center fundamentally American in his thinking and in his values...

Let's explicitly own "American" in our programs, the speeches and the values. He doesn't...

We are never going to say anything about his background - we have to show the value of ours when it comes to making decisions, understanding the needs of most American - the invisible Americans...

Isn't this precisely the strategy that the McCain-Palin campaign is going to pursue? Clinton couldn't quite bring herself to do it. and for good reason, if she'd followed this scorched earth strategy she'd have split the party in half and made it, I think, almost impossible for her to have beaten McCain in November. (One example: she'd have lost huge numbers of black voters.) So it would, as they say, have been a Pyrrhic victory. The reward for destroying Obama would come at too great a cost.

For that we may be thankful. It would have been an ugly, dispiriting business. Worse than that, in fact, since it would make one wonder what a black politician would have to do, what he would have to be, to get elected. (Flippant answer: a Republican?) Or to put it another way, one might imagine a black politician with a stronger resume standing for President, but it's difficult to believe that said candidate would be blessed with Obama's obvious political skills.  

But I'm afraid that if McCain wins the reaction elsewhere in the world will be that America just won't vote for the black guy. The european media will see it as confirmation that the United States remains, deep in its dark heart, a fundamentally racist society. Of course this is overly-simplistic, but there you have it. In other words, as far as the rest of the world is concerned, it is (almost) impossible for John McCain to win the election on his own merits.

That, of course, need not concern the Republican campaign unduly. Sarah Palin's speech last night suggests that the GOP is quite prepared to adopt the Penn playbook. Deep down, I think many Democrats secretly fear this.

Perhaps "hope" and "change" can prevail against such an assault (at the moment I'd still say Obama is favourite to win) but the power of  "USA! USA! USA!" (a nationalist chant that, for understandable and obvious historical reasons, sounds dangerous and troubling to european ears) ought not to be under-estimated. That's doubly so when the GOP ticket comprises a bona fide war hero and a woman who might have been designed to express a certain kick-ass maternal ideal of the American id. These are powerful forces, even if one may also wonder if the GOP of 2008 is quite as in touch with "ordinary" America, in its gut, as it has been for most of the past 40 years.

Until Palin spoke, I rather thought this GOP convention looked and sounded like 1996. Angry and unsure how best to attack an opponent for whom the party has little real respect in anything other than purely political terms. Angry and unsure and also somewhat resigned to defeat. It had been a convention that seemed to be going through the motions; dutiful rather than inspiring. Was McCain going to be Dole re-heated? That seemed a definite possibility.

Now, yes, there's more to be done in terms of offering McCain's recipe for "real" reform (which may need to be, as I've suggested, a curious, even baffling, blend of Perot and Sarkozy) but you can now see a way forward for the GOP ticket. And much of that is down to that little woman from Wasilla, Alaska. 

There's one more line mark Penn wrote for Hillary that could perhaps be adapted for McCain-Palin: "This is no time for rookies... she may not be a new face, but she will give this country a new start." That could easily become, "This is no time for rookies, John McCaiin may not be a new face, but he and Sarah Palin will give this country a new start". Would that be enough? Perhaps not, but the game is more properly afoot now than it was just 48 hours ago...