James, while purely one lone anecdote on this thread, Mr. Campbell might be evidence that for the current base of the GOP, having few new ideas/being anti-intellectual is a feature, not a bug.

Why don't you guys start beating your gums about how liberalism is going to work over the next 4 years instead of trying to tell us Conservatives how to reprogram. Heck, 18% of the registered Republicans stayed home.. we put a moderate in the race that turned most of us off.. and of course, we couldn't overcome the freaking aura of electing the first Black President and a Messiah at the same time.

From my stand point I am waiting for you folks to prove that liberal politics, spending, and government dependency will turn things around. Until you do you have no business telling us Conservatives what will work and won't work. We know what will work. Reagan knew what worked. Of course what he did is too simple for the liberal thinker to intellectually understand.

Personally I am happy the Liberals won.. they are going to own ALL the wonderful crap happening in America now. Of course they will blame everything on Bush, but what the hell, that is how the Liberals operate, it is always someone else's fault, including this article on how the Conservatives need to change.. remember CHANGE is the Obama slogan, not ours.

I'm done.. if you post this I will never believe you had the guts.

One serious practical problem with getting the movement back on track is that it's spent so long telling it's members that they can have their cake and eat it too and that anyone who tells them otherwise has ulterior motives. Its going to be hard to convince them that they can't.

But there are a lot of dumb people here too, and people who are culturally backwards and don't like blacks and think gays should be arrested and so forth. I'm not believing a stereotype, I'm basically just describing my relatives. For instance when my younger brother was 16 he said he wanted a t-shirt of Michael Jordan, and one of my relatives said "Why do you want a shirt with a n***** on it?" That was only like 10 years ago. And in the wave of the civil rights movement in the 1960's a bunch of whites were really pissed off by the whole thing and started making more noise in politics and Nixon and Buchanan and those guys started cultivating them. And the more you play to people like that, the more you drive young educated urban people away and it becomes a self reinforcing thing and after several decades your policies are totally retarded and out of touch and when your party gets total control like it had from 2000 to 2006 you make a complete mess of everything you touch. I used to consider myself something of a conservative, when I thought of conservatives as George HW Bush and William Buckley. The more I got to see, the more I saw that that's not the modern conservative movement. The modern conservative movement is stocked with people who think that gay people will somehow threaten straight people's marriages, Paying for tax cuts with deficit spending is a fantastic idea, and global warming is just a conspiracy of several thousand scientists. This isn't simply wrong or out of touch, it's (expletive) crazy. Serious conservative Wick Allison recently called the GOP the "Party of Stupid". Even the intellectual conservative places have been crazified. I went to National Review's "The Corner" a couple of months ago and counted 28 mentions of ACORN on the first page. National Review! Lots of educated people like myself have been pushed away. I would like to read intelligent conservative blogs, because all I read pretty much these days is Kevin Drum, Washington Monthly, Yglesias, Spencer Ackerman etc.

I just have a hard time finding intelligent conservative blogs. Any time I venture to a right-wing blog I start seeing Obama is a terrorist! Obama is a socialist! Nancy Pelosi wants your kindergartener to watch gay porn! or whatever and I'm not going to read incredibly dumb junk so I stop going. And then they lose humongously and they say Hmm....we should have been even conservier! More base! McCain was too liberal! That was clearly the problem! Ronald Reagan! Ronald Reagan!

No dude. Ronald Reagan was not the problem. The problem is you're appealing to a bunch of uneducated Christianists and so you've lost young educated and tolerant people. Put them together with blacks, women, and Latinos, and you lose. Since the GOP reaction to the loss seems to want to be to get extra basey, I expect them to lose again for the next several years. Once they get tired of losing, they'll start reaching out to tolerant and educated people again and eventually be competitive again. But for now I just expect them to retreat further into the Fox / Freep / Rush / Hannity collective of the clueless. They need some time in the wilderness. After they lose 2 or 3 more elections they're going to start wondering if pandering to the shrinking demographic of older white southern uneducated men is such a good idea moving forward. And time out of power will let the public forget that their management of the economy and the federal budget is distinctly poorer than the Democrats, all rhetoric to the contrary.

There aren't any "conservative" solutions to income disparity, the lack of health insurance, environmental degradation, etc. because conservatives, unlike voters, do not see these things as problems. The fact that 99% of American incomes are stagnant while 1% have increased over the last 8 years is a feature rather than a bug to these guys. Global warming doesn't exist because, wow, it's chilly today! It's not a philosophy that exactly thrives on rigorous critical thinking. I mean, try to imagine the extent of the hostility to science and objective evidence you would have to maintain to deny evolution.

Whereas I will always remember Yglesias' analysis of how the economy does better under Democratic presidents, complete with fairly striking graph, followed by his questioning of why this should be, since the executive shouldn't really have as much control over the economy as that would imply, and what other factors could be at play. Just try to imagine a right-wing blogger confronted with favorable statistics stepping back for a moment and looking at them dispassionately and less favorably.

There are no "conservative" solutions to global warming, crumbling infrastructure, health care, increasing wealth disparity, shrinking manufacturing base, or unregulated corrupt markets -- because those things cannot be solved by a free market or tax cuts, yet a free market and tax cuts are all that conservatives ever had.

The right's base has been conditioned that there is a simple black and white answer for everything.

The right as treated nuanced and measured debate as nothing more than a nuisance. Anyone on the left that pointed this out was treated as weak or hit with ad hominem attacks.

The right is extremely good at pushing their message in the media and doing it in a way that completely (and intentionally) boils it down into yes/no arguments and is able to rile the base.

"Obama is a socialist!"
"Up or down vote!"
"Voted for it before he was against it!"

A perfect example is "Joe the Plumber." Here is a guy, embraced by the right base that wasn't really a plumber (or was performing work illegally), wasn't really "getting ready to buy a plumbing business," and had a lein for unpaid taxes and there is now talk of him running for congress?!? He isn't particularly bright, plays by his own rules, yet the right loves him because He is an "average joe"? He is an opportunist and a political prop, nothing more.

Sorry, but I don't want to have a beer with my elected representatives. I want someone smart as hell that is legislating on my behalf.

I realize there are lot on the right like Mr. Joyner that see this, but how can you fight it when the bulk of your base is more Walmart than intellectually curious.

THE 'RIGHROOTS'.... The Washington Post ran an interesting, 2,300-word item today on conservative blogs and their future within (alongside?) the Republican Party. As far as leading conservative activists -- online and off -- are concerned, the right ...

Kevin Drum has more here and links to this post by James Joyner, a conservative and an intelligent one at that. Joyner suggests that conservatives remain obsessed with the issues surrounding the 1980 election and the Reagan administration.In fairness t...