James Wolcott: Mahogany Sleigh Bed Heads for the Cliff: Wolcott's Blog: vanityfair.com

James Wolcott's Blog: Mahogany Sleigh Bed Heads for the Cliff: Wolcott's Blog: vanityfair.com: Do mine eyes deceive me, or is this a really good column by Peggy Noonan on the Republican disarray? Sanity seems to have returned as if from a long sea voyage spent with the gulls.

The headline Wednesday on Drudge, from Politico, said, "Republicans Stunned by Loss in Mississippi." It was about the eight-point drubbing the Democrat gave the Republican in the special House election. My first thought was: You have to be stupid to be stunned by that. Second thought: Most party leaders in Washington are stupid – detached, played out, stuck in the wisdom they learned when they were coming up, in '78 or '82 or '94. Whatever they learned then, they think pertains now. In politics especially, the first lesson sticks. For Richard Nixon, everything came back to Alger Hiss.

They are also – Hill leaders, lobbyists, party speakers – successful, well-connected, busy and rich. They never guessed, back in '86, how government would pay off! They didn't know they'd stay! They came to make a difference and wound up with their butts in the butter. But affluence detaches, and in time skews thinking. It gives you the illusion you're safe, and that everyone else is. A party can lose its gut this way.

Many are ambivalent, deep inside, about the decisions made the past seven years in the White House. But they've publicly supported it so long they think they . . . support it. They get confused. Late at night they toss and turn in the antique mahogany sleigh bed in the carpeted house in McLean and try to remember what it is they really do think, and what those thoughts imply.

And those are the bright ones. The rest are in Perpetual 1980: We have the country, the troops will rally in the fall.

This explains the almost touching devotion, tinged with desperation, that one can witness almost every day over at NRO's Corner, where one lunchtime slacker or another relays with excitement Rush Limbaugh's latest mouthblast of derision against spineless Republicans and gutless liberals--Rush was "on fire" today, they quiver, sounding like Nanny Hawkins huddled around the wireless marveling how Mr. Churchill just gave that Mr. Hitler quite a talking-to. Rush is the only last troop-rally'er this tired-blood brigade has left and their clinging to the backward tug of his stale certitudes (global warming is an enviromental-wacko socialist sham, etc) only widens the distance between them and the reality of how much damage kneejerk conservatism and blind Bush loyalty has inflicted on the Republican Party. Noonan:

What happens to the Republicans in 2008 will likely be dictated by what didn't happen in 2005, and '06, and '07. The moment when the party could have broken, on principle, with the administration – over the thinking behind and the carrying out of the war, over immigration, spending and the size of government – has passed. What two years ago would have been honorable and wise will now look craven. They're stuck.

Mr. Bush has squandered the hard-built paternity of 40 years. But so has the party, and so have its leaders. If they had pushed away for serious reasons, they could have separated the party's fortunes from the president's. This would have left a painfully broken party, but they wouldn't be left with a ruined "brand," as they all say, speaking the language of marketing. And they speak that language because they are marketers, not thinkers. Not serious about policy. Not serious about ideas. And not serious about leadership, only followership.

This is and will be the great challenge for John McCain: The Democratic argument, now being market tested by Obama Inc., that a McCain victory will yield nothing more or less than George Bush's third term.

That was one of the chords Obama struck today in his response to Bush's "Nazi appeaser" accusation before the Israeli Knesset--he firmly, deftly mummy-wrapped Bush and McCain together and dropped them off at the pier. It's rather impressive to see a first-term senator chastise the President of the United States and the presumptive nominee of the Republican Party as if he were the headmaster and they the ones guilty of infractions unworthy of upperclassmen. That's one of the benefits of having an oratorical voice that sounds tall--it automatically adds height to every utterance, allowing them to drop like acorns and make a nice thunk when they bounce off of the nearest thick skull.