Michael Cohen in the NYT:

But in some respects this is not completely Mr. McCain’s fault. He is the leader of a political party that has run out of steam. The Republican Party seems more and more like a spent and rudderless force, devoid of new ideas for how to govern the country, and wedded to its unbending political orthodoxies, of cutting government spending, removing regulation and reducing income taxes.

Indeed, more than one observer noted the contradiction of Ms. Palin on Thursday decrying overbearing government while in the next breath calling for more government oversight of Wall Street. On Tuesday, Mr. McCain had similar problems, as he called for a spending freeze right after pledging support for an expensive new program to buy up bad mortgages. With a potential $300 billion price tag, Mr. McCain offered little sense of how he would pay for the plan.

What has happened to the Republican Party is not unusual in American politics. A similar phenomenon befell Democrats in the 1970s and 1980s as they became so tied to their liberal orthodoxies they were unable to shift course and devise policies to respond to the changing needs and desires of middle class America.

Since the failure of the G.O.P.’s Contract with America in 1995-1996, the Republican Party has flirted with political decline; in 2000 a smart campaign by George W. Bush crafted around the notion of compassionate conservatism nabbed the White House. But since then the party has moved further and further to the right, out of the mainstream of American political thought, while at the same time Democrats, led by Mr. Obama, have reclaimed the political center with new ideas and a palpable energy for moving the country forward. The rising fortunes of the Democratic Party and the precipitous fall of the G.O.P. were on full display Tuesday night. At a time when John McCain needed desperately to find the masterstroke that would allow him to reclaim the initiative from Barack Obama, he found a G.O.P. policy cupboard bereft of ideas. ...

Posted by Laura at October 8, 2008 08:15 PM