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Has The GOP Lost Enough to Change?

"Stand for something," urged a Time magazine headline referring to the Republican Party in November 1949. Republicans had lost five presidential elections in a row. Their two big ideas had become outdated: The United States post-war ascendency as a superpower ended isolationism and the Great Depression sundered the belief in unregulated markets.

This year, however, does not seem to mark the same reckoning that began in 1949. Conservatives are gathering today for their first large conference since the 2008 election. The Conservative Political Action Conference is putting "timeless principles" before "new challenges," to which one panel is dedicated. In general, conservatives are chiefly bothered by the erosion of their principles. Most have concluded that they lost power not because of conservatism, but rather because the GOP failed to act conservatively. The Republicans stance today? GOP Minority Leader John Boehner ruefully declared to Congress Wednesday that "the era of big government" has returned. Of course with programs like the Medicare reform bill, conservatives realize "big government" never really left Washington in the Bush era.

"The conservative look at the 2008 election was that the problem was with Republican performance and not conservative values," said David Keene, the chairman of the American Conservative Union and lead organizer of CPAC. According to this view, the right's greatest mistake was giving way to George W. Bush's apostasy. "We didn't object to things that were going off the track," Keene said. "If you lay down with the politicians you entrusted with your vision and if you lay down when they are off the track, then it's your fault."

After Democrats trounced Republicans in two national elections, CPAC's panels deal with "new challenges in the culture war" or "whether President Obama's tax policy will 'kill entrepreneurship'?" There are also panels for a Hispanic coalition and one for young Republicans on "rebuilding the movement." However, there are no panels on why the movement has withered, what new ideas are required to regain power or why the GOP is repeatedly losing first-time voters. Anxiety over the party's future is conspicuously absent.

There remains an "unspoken" division in the conservative movement that is forming a "great chasm," said GOP strategist John Weaver. Weaver is best known for leading Senator John McCain's 2000 insurgent bid against the GOP establishment favorite, Bush. "It's not so much about ideology but it has to do with realism and who is dealing with reality and who is not."

The division is between purists and reformers. Think Rush Limbaugh versus David Brooks. Yet it's Limbaugh who is capping off the conference, not Brooks. And it's notable that Limbaugh chose this year to make his first appearance at the conference. He personifies a party reaching back to its base. Oddly, conservative activists are emboldened at a time when Republicans are most torn down. There is a sense Barry Goldwater is defeating Nelson Rockefeller all over again.

The GOP's new leader, Michael Steele, an African American whose mother picked cotton in the South, is speaking at the conference as well. Though visibly a different kind of Republican, Steele, too, is seemingly leaning toward the purist camp.

The Northeast, where Steele came of age in politics, has only three Republican senators remaining. It was those three senators who broke with the GOP and joined Democrats in backing the $787 billion stimulus bill. Steele has subsequently said he is "open" to "retribution" against the three GOP senators -- Maine Senators Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins and Pennsylvania's Arlen Specter -- depending upon the position of the state parties.

No less than the conservative Washington Times recently came to the three senators' defense, arguing that Republicans can hardly afford to estrange its last leaders in the region. "Saving that rare bird, the Northeast Republican," read the Times' editorial.

Republicans certainly are in an unfamiliar wilderness. In 1993, Democrats had control of Congress and the White House, but Bill Clinton's meager 43 percent of the vote bridled Democrats' mandate. Not since Lyndon Johnson has conservatism had so little power in Washington.

Today, just three in 10 Americans "trust" Republicans more than Democrats "to do a better job in coping with the main problems the nation faces over the next few years," according to the latest ABC News/Washington Post Poll. Fifty-six percent of those polled have more trust in Democrats, the party's highest level of public confidence since the question was first asked in 1982.

Keene does recognize this "loss of credibility." But conservatives seem to be more worried about the moderation of the Republican Party, circa Dwight Eisenhower following Harry Truman.

"Take your philosophies and principles and apply them to the times," Keene said. "It's not enough to stand athwart to history, and say stop, as Buckley said."

It was in Eisenhower's day that William F. Buckley helped resolve the conflict between old principles and new times. Buckley was able to unite and change conservative thought because the GOP's repeated losses had brought enough humility to breed reform. But Republicans today are not at the low point of 1949. They are still led by a generation who has mostly known power. Perhaps, Weaver posited, we "haven't lost enough."

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