Robert Stacy McCain strikes again:

In other words, Rush’s 20 million listeners are what’s wrong with the Republican Party. If only they’d listen to these young Harvard graduates who know everything . . .

That isn’t what Ross said, as Ross was arguing against the obviously ridiculous claim from Limbaugh that it is somehow undesirable to win over independent and moderate voters during election campaigns.  As McCain might say, even a Harvard graduate can see the flaw in this view. 

However, in point of fact, yes, that audience is part of what’s wrong with the Republican Party.  Part of what has been wrong with the GOP is that its rank-and-file members take their political advice and insights from radio entertainers who seem to understand little about political reality and even less about policy, and who substitute bluster for understanding.  When they are confronted with an administration that does much the same, they have seemed only too willing to buy into the bluster.  They remain steadfastly loyal to a failed President and his indefensible decisions, and they break with him only when he supports measures that are absolutely intolerable and even then they do this only when the President is profoundly unpopular and no longer very influential.  This audience may have the right views about many things, but in practice that translates into reliable loyalty to a party that virtually never serves their interests, which enables the politicians who support all of the intolerable policies that they themselves reject. 

The “young Harvard graduates” and the like may not have the right answers, and indeed I think they don’t have most of the right answers, but they at least recognize that there is something deeply awry on the American right that isn’t going to be fixed by repeating worn-out mantras and slapping oneself on the back.  The Limbaugh approach recommended to his audience (which hasn’t been 20 million-strong in years) is that Republicans and conservatives have made no mistakes and need to learn nothing, except that they were not hard-core and true-believing enough according to whatever caricature of conservatism Limbaugh claims to represent, which actually might not be so very conservative after all.  Being far to the right of Limbaugh, even I can recognize the absurdity of the argument that Republicans do not need to expand their coalition beyond core constituencies.  Of course, it is only absurd if you assume that they want to win elections.

This brings me to another point.  Mr. McCain would like to buy Jim Nuzzo, a Bush White House aide, a drink for his promised defenestration of anti-Palin conservatives.  Very good.  On the verge of one of the more impressive electoral defeats in the last thirty years, members of the Bush administration have the gall to threaten other people on the right with exclusion from the ever-shrinking numbers of the GOP for the crime of having come to the conclusion that Palin is not the answer to what ails the right.  Even though she is an embodiment of exactly the sort of Republican self-congratulation that will not win elections, she has somehow become the symbol of the future.  How you respond to Palin has become a litmus test to determine whether you are worthy and have a future on the right, which is another way of saying that the right won’t have much of a future if it makes Palin loyalty tests mandatory.  Many thousands of people, and perhaps many more, who are sympathetic to a center-right agenda will gladly, enthusiastically fail such a ridiculous test.