Wish I'd Said That: George Packer on Changing Times

George Packer comments on conservative opposition to Barack Obama in his New Yorker blog.

But, as Richard Hofstadter observed in The American Political Tradition, “What ruined Hoover’s public career was not a sudden failure of personal capacity but the collapse of the world that had produced him and shaped his philosophy…Because, on his postulates, his program should have been successful, he went on talking as though it were, and the less his ideas worked, the more defiantly he advocated them.”

This is an apt description of the current attitude of John McCain, Eric Cantor, and Bobby Jindal. Like Hoover, they cannot fathom the failure of their philosophy, so they cling to it and insist that it has all the answers while the country drowns.

Packer, David Brooks of The New York Times, and David Frum of New Majority all point out that the GOP is rendering itself irrelevant with its failure to respond to rapidly worsening economic conditions.

--Ballard Burgher