In Which I Think Andrew Samwick Misses the Point...

I am not concern trolling--that is, I am almost certainly that I am not consciously concern trolling--but I think Andrew Samwick misses the point when he writes:

The Right Wing Strategy | Capital Gains and Games: I suspect it will take months or even years for those on the political and ideological Right to map out a strategy to compete in national elections after two sound defeats in 2006 and 2008. The first step has been to assign blame.... Christie Todd Whitman in yesterday's Washington Post lays the blame on "social fundamentalists." I don't know how constructive that is -- each Party has a base, and if you alienate the base, you have to make inroads substantially across the political center to make up for it. The most liberal Republican he could have picked for his running mate would have been Whitman herself. I don't think that ticket would have run any better against Obama-Biden this year...

Andrew Samwick has no influence on how the next Republican presidential and congressional candidates will campaign. But he does have the potential to have considerable impact on how those Republican members of congress (and perhaps presidents) govern: to push them toward governing in a constructive conservative manner--rather than be, say, a rerun of Gingrich-Armey-DeLay-Boehner-Dole-Lott-McConnell-Bush governance, which has been "conservative" only in its social policy.

So I want to hear something very different from Andrew this winter: I want to hear what ideas and policies the Republican Party could serve as a carrier for that would make America a better country and the world a better world, and I want to hear how all of us can help make the Republican Party the carrier of those ideas--rather than the ideas of, say, National Review, The Weekly Standard, and Rush Limbaugh, to name three sets that America and the world would be better off without.