McCain's real problem is GOP ideas

Greg Anrig (author of The Conservatives Have No Clothes: Why Right-Wing Ideas Keep Failing) says today's conservatives are facing a major dilemma (WaPo):

That choice is whether to stick with rhetoric and policies wedded to free markets, limited government and bellicose unilateralism, or to endorse a more robust role for the public sector at home while relying more on diplomacy and international institutions abroad. Either way, conservative Republicans seem destined to have a much harder time winning elections for the foreseeable future. Just ask McCain how much fun he's having. [...]

Shifting course won't be easy, either. Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam, a pair of conservative authors decades younger than Gingrich and Norquist, argue in their new, much-hyped book "Grand New Party" that the time has come to "move beyond the Reagan legacy and the mindset of the current Republican power structure." They suggest plenty of proposals that many progressives would support, including a fairly ambitious and expensive national health-care plan, subsidies for entry-level jobs and more investment in infrastructure.

But while Douthat and Salam deserve credit for alerting fellow conservatives to the perils of staying the course, their embrace of a relatively activist government — if adopted by the broader movement — would shift political battles to a playing field on which progressives have a much stronger footing.

Anrig concludes that conservatives are basically damned if they do change and damned if they don't. Well, that's the problem you face when you've tied your political brand to ideas that don't work.