Perhaps it's the image of Sarah Palin fumbling yet another headline in the nine months since she shot onto the political stage. Palin was relegated this week to watching Newt Gingrich give the keynote speech at a GOP fundraiser, a speech she could have seized for herself.

Perhaps it's how Gingrich, along with other GOP leaders, quickly turned substantive issues surrounding Sonia Sotomayor's identity politics and flipped the story into exaggerated charges of racism. These lines came from the same right that saw many of its own injured by similar broadsides. Recall Edward Kennedy's line on Robert Bork's America, where "women would be forced into back-alley abortions [and] blacks would sit at segregated lunch counters."

Perhaps it's Wednesday's Gallup poll. A slim majority of Americans were stumped when asked to name "the main person who speaks for Republican Party today." The remaining portion selected, in respective order: Rush Limbaugh, Dick Cheney, John McCain and Gingrich.

As USA Today's Susan Page put it, "the dominant faces of the Republican Party are all men, all white, all conservative and all old enough to join AARP." This is the same party that last year lost young and Hispanic voters by a 2-1 ratio.

Republicans keep undermining their own revival.

Cheney, Gingrich and Limbaugh, of course, have supporting roles in today's Republican Party. But they are not its stars of tomorrow.

In May, House GOP leader John Boehner was asked by CNN about the three men. Boehner said they help show "a better way forward" for the party. But just as the past tends to catch up with progressives, conservatives tend to get caught up in the past. This "better way forward" perhaps is precisely that, forward.

Republicans are, indeed, not looking forward right now. This GOP is making it easier for Democrats to not only win two national elections but also an era. The GOP is like a fighter rising from the mat, still dizzy after a knockdown blow.

To be sure, it's incongruent with history to expect Republicans to comeback within months of their loss. Richard Nixon only won a presidency by inches in 1968, so soon after Barry Goldwater was decimated, because the FDR coalition had been tearing at the seams for years. But today, Republicans resemble the dusk of the FDR coalition, not Democrats.

There were big issues in the late 1960s that undid Democrats--urban upheaval, Vietnam, the counter culture and the civil rights movement--but Nixon's wisdom also allowed Republicans capitalize on those issues.

Nixon learned from his and Goldwater's defeats. It was Goldwater who argued for the use of "low-yield atomic weapons" against the Vietcong or, in a comment Limbaugh might echo today, quipped about sawing off Eastern seaboard.

Nixon was careful by comparison. Where Goldwater voted against the Civil Rights Act, Nixon spoke of "a new alignment for American unity."

Between 1960 and 1972, the rate of violent crime and robbery tripled. Nixon framed himself as the champion of law and order.

And Nixon took image seriously. He did a series of infomercials to sell the "new Nixon" in 1968. His staff was so meticulous that Nixon aide Roger Ailes had curtains removed from one set and replaced them with stark-wooden panels. "The wood has clear, solid, masculine lines," Ailes said.

Nixon's eye on demographics threaded each of these steps. Since Nixon's 1952 Checkers speech, no figure was more aware that the FDR's "forgotten man" was feeling forgotten by FDR's heirs, and so were many of their wives as well.

Today, every GOP strategist can recite the demographic trends working against Republicans. But there is yet no sustained GOP effort to confront those trends.

A couple months ago, Republican leaders went to Virginia to simply talk about outreach. Some conservative commentators criticized them for convening the discussion. As David Brooks asked, were conservatives against talking now?

It is Brooks own battle for GOP moderation that has become more side court than center court. There are scant mainstream moderate GOP voices to pushback against the conservative wing. It's less a matter of wining the argument than balancing it.

It was famously The Saturday Evening Post that confronted Goldwater. "Goldwater," the Post editorialized, "is a grotesque burlesque of the conservative he pretends to be. He is a wild man, a stray, an unprincipled and ruthless jujitsu artist like Joe McCarthy."

In other words, today's GOP could use more big voices in the big middle. Three of its four lead faces stem from its right wing. The fourth, McCain, has stayed his move rightward in recent years. Meanwhile, Barack Obama is poaching rare moderates like John Huntsman.

This absent counterweight explains the lax introspection on the right. Palin has squandered what could have been a half year of go-to-the woods moments, where she could discover her thinking, her principles and her delivery. After all, with humility and introspection, even Nixon repackaged himself.

A forebearer to the last winning conservative coalition, Peter Viereck, once wrote that, "American history is based on the resemblance between moderate liberalism and moderate conservatism."

It took about a decade after Nixon--who governed as a moderate--for the more conservative Ronald Reagan to take the party helm. And even then, Reagan was Goldwater sunny side up.

As conservative commentator Joe Scarborough constantly pounds home, disposition also matters. Somehow, the same GOP leaders who venerate Reagan have missed a central reason Reagan succeeded.

After all, to the average voter, which Republican do today's GOP leaders most resemble, Goldwater or Reagan? The answer is yet one more example of Republicans' problems.