Nevertheless, he [Tom Cole] is sanguine regarding 2008: “The positioning is good for us” because “we don’t have to conquer new territory, we have to reclaim old territory.” ~George Will

Give the man credit for staying on message.  By this sort of thinking, the Macedonians, Greeks and Mongolians are on the verge of some of the greatest geopolitical comebacks in world history.  They don’t have to conquer new territory–they just need to reclaim their old provinces!  It is all terribly misleading.  It is possible for a declining stock to be an excellent buying opportunity.  It is also possible for that stock to be Enron, especially when the people in charge of the company deceive their shareholders and mismanage the company for their own temporary benefit.  From the way Rep. Cole is telling it, the Byzantines must have been in good shape after Yarmuk, because all they had to do was “just” recover lost territory.  Oh, well, if that’s all, why worry? 

Well, the worry is that, like any force after a big defeat, the Republicans are having trouble coming up with the recruits needed to fight another day.  Confidence in the commanders, so to speak, has been shattered, and precious resources have been depleted during the last, ill-starred contest.  The Three ‘Mo’s (momentum, morale and money) are all on the other side.  As Clausewitz might have said if he were a political blogger, “Voter identification is to fundraising as three to one.”  And the Republicans are also losing the fundraising race, which used to be their strong suit.

Plus, they are apparently not very good at analysing current electoral politics:

Cole thinks that Democrats, who he says have more litmus tests for their presidential candidates than Republicans do [bold mine-DL], are so convinced that they are going to win the White House, they are not resisting what they enjoy surrendering to — the tug from the party’s left.

He’s kidding, right?  More litmus tests?  Obama just gave one of the most interventionist speeches of any presidential candidate ever and the progressives have made a tiny bit of noise about it.  He has supported cap-and-trade, when the left wants something much more bold.  There have been no obvious consequences from the left for Obama taking the centrist hawk ball and running with it, and indeed I would surprised if we see any major attack against Obama from the left.  I think he believes he can win them over with his biography and charisma and his heavy-handed comparisons of himself with RFK, and he just may.  By contrast, just consider how much grief Edwards took (and not from Mike Gravel) for saying “all options are on the table” with respect to Iran, and then consider how easy Obama has had it after giving a speech praised by both Robert Kagan and Marty Peretz, a bipartisan dynamic duo of hideous foreign policy ‘thinking’.    With Obama’s speech, Edwards has become the de facto less obnoxiouly interventionist progressive on foreign policy that Obama was pretending to be earlier.  (Except for Kucinich and Gravel, there are no non-interventionists in the race on the Democratic side.) 

I suppose the argument would be that Iraq is the litmus test for Democratic candidates, and all have been forced to toe a line for phased withdrawal, timetables, etc.  Of course, what is remarkable in all of this is that the “litmus test” position that Clinton has supposedly been “compelled” to take is basically the centrist hawk position on Iraq that Obama has felt compelled to embrace to avoid appearing too antiwar.  No sense jeopardising his lifelong ambition to be President over something so trivial as real opposition to a war. 

Bruce Bartlett’s paeans to her courage notwithstanding, Clinton has not apologised for her Iraq war vote because she a) doesn’t think she needs to apologise and b) knows that she will not pay a particularly heavy price for not doing so.  This is because the litmus test on Iraq is very easy to pass: you have to make clear, in no uncertain terms, that as President you will end the war.  The thinking seems to be that what the candidate says or does before then is merely the means to that end.  It would appear that antiwar progressives may be willing to empower someone who has a foreign policy not substantially different from Bush’s simply to get a Democrat in office to make some attempt at concluding the war in Iraq.  Anyway, it is profoundly mistaken to think that the Democrats are in worse shape because of their confidence.  As a party they are much more united around their eventual nominee, whoever it may be, and their combination of confidence in victory and hunger for winning the White House are eerily similar to Republican indifference to Bush’s deviations from traditional conservatism after eight years of Clinton.  The left’s leverage in ’08 will be less than it was in the midterms, especially if an Obama or Edwards gets the nod.  Republicans keep planning their campaigns with the assumption that the Democrats will collapse in a fit of disunity and/or lunacy, but this didn’t happen last year and it isn’t going to happen next year.  The Republicans need to develop an actual strategy for winning in their own right.  From what I saw in Tom Cole’s remarks, they don’t have the first clue. 

Instead of being horrified that IL-06 in DuPage County, where Henry Hyde used to routinely pull 60% of the vote or more until 2004, almost fell to a no-name Iraq war veteran Democratic challenger, Mr. Cole believes the closeness of the race in 2006 works to Republican advantage!  The truth is that DuPage County isn’t the Republican stronghold it once was–the Dems got 44% in 2004 and 48% in 2006.  Obviously, if they keep making steady gains like that in what was once a suburban bastion of Republicanism, you can forget about retaking the House in the next decade.  

On the separate note, consider the beginning of Will’s column:

Tom Cole earned a PhD in British history from the University of Oklahoma, intending to become a college professor, but he came to his senses and to a zest for politics [bold mine-DL], and now, in just his third term in the House of Representatives, he is chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee.

While it does hold out hope for all Ph.D. students everywhere that they, too, might one day enter politics and become campaign coordinators in doomed, lost causes, consider the attitude Will’s shot at academia represents.  If anyone wants an explanation for why the academy is dominated by the left and why the youngest cohort of voters has gone even more overwhelmingly for the Democrats than usual, you need look no further than precisely this sort of professional cop-out, giving up on educating the next generation for the sake of the easy, cheap and ephemeral victories of politics.  Every conservative out there complains about the declining standards of education, the ruin of the academy, the politicisation of the classroom and on and on, but what happens when it comes time to step up and do some of the educating themselves?  They go to law school to get a “useful” degree, or go into politics or some other field where the “prospects” for the future are better, and then wonder how the media, academia, the arts and cinema have all been taken over by people who loathe everything they believe.  

When I am occasionally tempted by the political road (however ludicrously impractical such a road would be), I am often reminded of that quote from Max: “What would you rather do: change how people see or how they pay their taxes?”  The poverty of so much of conservatism today is a result of way too many otherwise decent and sane people opting for the latter goal rather than the former.  Nowadays, it seems that they can’t even do that part very well.  Perhaps it would be better if more conservatives turned to teaching, cultivating and creating things rather than running uninspired electoral campaigns.