Ponnuru: GOP Has Lost Its Way

Conservative columnist Ramesh Ponnuru writes that the Republican Party has lost its way in Bloomberg News. Ponnuru thinks the GOP wrongly concluded that its 2006 and 2008 losses were due to losing touch with conservative values (e.g. expanding government spending) rather than incompetent governance and rampant corruption.

That mythology influences the Republican presidential primaries, too. It’s why they have, to an unusual extent, showcased unpopular ideas that have no chance of going anywhere, such as abolishing the Environmental Protection Agency. It is part of the reason for the resistance to former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney: Conservatives fear he would be a big- government Republican, like Bush, and lead the party again to ruin.

Meanwhile, the real mistakes of the Bush years keep being made. Republicans had nothing to say about wage stagnation then and are saying nothing about it now. The real cost of Republicans’ fixation on ideological purity is that it distracts them from their real problems, and the nation’s.

--Ballard Burgher