Lowry and Ponnuru note the obvious that so many on the right seem incapable of acknowledging or simply refuse to acknowledge:
The tendency arises from legitimate frustrations. The federal government seems constantly to expand even as — and sometimes because — it proves itself incompetent. Republicans have done precious little to reverse or even halt the trend. Obamacare is a disastrous and unpopular law; but if the Republican party has a strategy for bringing about its eventual end, it has been kept well-hidden.It's natural for extremists to have a Manichean view of the world - in fact it's no doubt necessary for them since strict dualism serves best the unreasonable argument detached from coarse reality - and the extremes of the left are just as bad as the extremes of the right in this regard. But as above points out, similarities of cause and effect end there for two very good reasons that put the GOP at a distinct disadvantage and that conservatives need to come to terms with if they hope to survive as a political force: one, the culture increasingly leans to or is openly tolerant of the left in its sympathies; and two, this lean left is especially true of the media and press and that particular bias is never going to go away. It's not that the extreme right is wrong in perceiving liberalism as a threat since untempered by conservative pragmatism and realism it definitely is a threat - what they get wrong is belief that the shallow comforts of outrage that translate into ideological rigidity are an intelligent or even simply a viable way to combat the threat. If we get to the point where such extremism is our only way forward against the predations of the welfare state, then the country will already be lost since such extremism is fundamentally undemocratic in nature.
So it is entirely reasonable to search for new ways to tame the welfare state rather than keep doing what has been done before. The Republican consultant class has often seemed to suffer from an almost clinical deficit of imagination. And the Republican party’s leadership could certainly use the occasional poke with a cattle prod. If the conservatives behind the defunding crusade now turn back to fighting the Senate’s immigration bill with the same passion and commitment, they will again be denounced by Democrats, the press, and some Republicans as a mindless wrecking crew. It shouldn’t stop them.
The key premise that has been guiding these conservatives, however, is mistaken. That premise is that the main reason conservatives have won so few elections and policy victories, especially recently, is a lack of ideological commitment and will among Republican politicians. A bigger problem than the insufficient conservatism of our leaders is the insufficient number of our followers. There aren’t enough conservative voters to elect enough officials to enact a conservative agenda in Washington, D.C. — or to sustain them in that project even if they were elected. The challenge, fundamentally, isn’t a redoubling of ideological commitment, but more success at persuasion and at winning elections.
No, the smart way forward is to nominate people who know how to get elected given the current environment and just as importantly know how to effectively govern given the current environment - look no further than Reagan and Obama as telling examples: they both we're pros when it came to knowing how to get elected, but only one of them knew how to govern - and that's the difference between a country living up to its great potential and a country in seeming decline on all fronts.
[I will say this though, if it's Christie vs Hillary in 2016 and Christie unlike Romney runs a great campaign that any objective observer would wholly agree was the superior campaign relative to Hillary's and yet she still wins because the media, as with Obama, refuses to acknowledge her flaws and weaknesses - well then, all bets are off - we'll be entering dangerous terra incognita at that point where one half of the country will start to see us as having fallen to a liberal coup enabled by the media - and I have no idea what happens then]
