Good ideas are meritorious. But being meritorious isn’t what wins elections. Most voters have only the faintest idea what policy ideas candidates advocate when running or implement when in office. External conditions (such as the economy, but war and scandal matter also) have much more influence over which party wins. ~Jonathan Chait

This is true, but it isn’t as if these “external conditions” have no relation to the policies that are actually pursued by the party in power. Were it not for some supremely bad policy ideas, some of them implemented by the executive branch and some by the President’s appointees at the Fed, for example, many of the “external conditions” that brought the GOP low in the last few years would not have existed or would have been less ruinous. It is true that minority parties do not win simply because they have well-crafted alternative policy ideas, but that is not an argument against developing them. Limbaugh is pretty clearly arguing that developing “better policy ideas” is directly harmful to GOP electoral fortunes, because he seems to see everyone interested in policy arguments as representing an attempt to abandon everything connected to Reagan and completely redefine conservatism. To say that having better ideas do not guarantee election victory is merely an observation about poorly-informed voters and the cynical and only partly true calculus that ideas, any ideas, are irrelevant to electoral outcomes. Could a Democratic nominee that did not oppose the war and had no objections against the torture regime have done as well as Obama did? Would a Republican nominee who broke with Bush over the bailout have done as poorly as McCain did? Surely at some point policy ideas, and differences over policy, have some significant effect on elections.

To listen to Limbaugh tell it, though, policy ideas are not all that important. That makes it all the more bizarre for Limbaugh, Jindal and the GOP leadership to interpret the last two elections as repudiations of the GOP’s “wasteful spending” ways and to adopt an accordingly austere fiscal policy position. If new policy ideas are irrelevant to a Republican comeback, as Limbaugh said and Chait grants, it seems that actual Republican policies cannot have had much of anything to do with their downfall. I doubt Chait would go so far as to grant this, and not even Limbaugh would agree with it, which is what makes his mockery of policy thinking even more foolish than it seems at first glance.

The entirety of movement conservative and Congressional GOP strategy, so called, that Limbaugh has been cheering on derives from the fanciful idea that the electorate turned against the GOP because of excessive spending. They believe that resisting Obama’s agenda will be rewarded by voters next year, which is why they are making a more or less suicidal bet that they will profit from simple rejectionism. This is an absurd misreading of the election results, of course, and it shows no evidence of learning from past defeats, but at the heart of everything the GOP is doing right now is an attempt to mount a comeback through what they regard as their “better policy ideas,” which in the limited imagination of most activists and partisans these days means more tax cuts and thwarting earmarks. While it may be possible to read Limbaugh’s statement as Chait does, Limbaugh made the statement in service to a specific set of positions on the stimulus and other issues to justify a stand-pat austerity agenda that no one outside core Republican voters supports in an era when fewer people identify as Republicans than at any time since the early ’80s.