Clearly, the Obama administration misread voters. When they asked for change, they weren’t asking for a trilliondollar spending lurch to the left. Despite Obama’s victory, media exit polls have consistently shown that the country remained ideologically where it has been for the past 25 years: center-right.

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For the past six weeks, Democrats and Republicans have been engaged in the biggest, riskiest, most costly game of political speed chess in the nation’s history.
A chess game starts with the “opening,” a series of moves that define the basic structure and direction the game is likely to take.

Sometimes chess players will begin with an unexpected opening to throw the opponent off. Then they execute a series of moves that takes the game back to a more familiar opening. That’s called transposition.

By presenting an unexpected opening before returning to the familiar, the player hopes his opponent’s moves will be less sharp.

This has clearly been Team Obama’s opening.

During the campaign, Barack Obama talked about creating a different kind of Washington, reducing partisanship, welcoming ideas “wherever they came from,” getting rid of earmarks, banning lobbyists from his administration and ensuring transparency.

During the transition, Obama made moves toward the political center with some moderate Cabinet appointments and statements.

Once in office, however, what looked like real change quickly transposed into the traditional Democratic liberal opening.

Obama handed over responsibility for writing the stimulus package to Hill Democrats, tolerated the exclusion of Republicans from the process, nominated lobbyists for key positions and looked the other way when his promised waiting period for signing legislation went by the boards — and that was just the first two weeks after the inauguration.

This was followed by his “new era of responsibility budget” that saddles the country with massive debt for generations and his decision to abdicate any responsibility for the omnibus budget bill and its 8,500 earmarks. Today, Obama’s transposition is virtually complete.

The Washington battle is back to the old traditional Republican versus Democrat debate, only with much bigger stakes and played at warp speed by Washington standards.

Democrats are once again pushing huge tax and spending increases as Republicans argue just the opposite.

Because they’ve been in this position before and lost, Democrats understand that to win in this center-right country, they must paint this as the direst economic crisis since the Great Depression by scaring people into overcoming their natural skepticism of policies of the far left.

To persuade centrist voters to embrace a leftist agenda, Democrats also have to successfully define the origins of the crisis to their benefit by blaming greedy bankers, the rich and Republicans for not regulating financial institutions.

Republicans counter that it was the Democrats’ social engineering policies at the root of the economic meltdown, pressuring banks to make risky loans and blocking reforms of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac in 2003.

In George Orwell’s “1984,” one party slogan asserted, “He who controls the past, controls the future.” Apt words for Democratic attempts to revise history to push their current agenda.

Ironically, when Obama and Hill Democrats sat down at the table in January, they were in a position to define the game, another chess concept called “initiative.” Whoever moves first has it and game play determines whether it can be sustained or wrested away by the opponent.

But the president has frittered away his initiative. As the markets tank, 401(k)’s disappear and public confidence begins to erode, Obama seems to have forgotten that the country wants seriousness and steadiness from its leaders in times of crisis, not gimmicky summits and photo ops.

By using the crisis to push a left-wing laundry list, he has begun to lose focus on his most serious challenge — the economy.

A radical new cap-and-trade energy policy that will raise the cost of energy on every American, a controversial housing policy and a cut in home mortgage deductions that will cause home values to decline even further are just a few of his proposals for change that have become negative distractions.

And he apparently does have time to worry about Rush Limbaugh. As the Democratic attack on Limbaugh showed, Obama and company clearly don’t know what to do about Wall Street, so they retreated to the kind of partisan politics candidate Obama promised to reject.

Republicans have not yet wrested the initiative away from Obama and Hill Democrats, but they have made progress as seen in survey results.

Support for Obama’s policies now trail his personal support, but if he keeps playing the game for speed and tactical gains, history shows his numbers are likely to shift, possibly quickly. Already, several national surveys put his job approval at less than 60 percent.

Obama needs to rethink his position. He might listen to what film director Stanley Kubrick had to say about the game: “What chess teaches you is that you must sit there calmly and think about whether it’s really a good idea and whether there are other, better ideas.”

Roll Call

His shots may have gotten a laugh in the White House briefing room, but across America, homeowners who are “playing by the rules” and paying their mortgages on time were cheering for Santelli, who clearly struck a nerve. Round One goes to Santelli.

Gibbs’ decision to go into attack mode was clear evidence that, for the first time in this new presidency, Team Obama is worried. Maybe it was the Santelli video’s half- million hits on YouTube or maybe it was the larger problem that their White House debut has been characterized by a series of missteps.

Cabinet selection screw-ups have reminded voters that Democrats and taxes have never been a good combination and undermined Obama and his staff’s image of competence and cool. His administration’s stimulus package, written by Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) and rammed through Congress by a Democratic majority with no pretense to bipartisanship, has struggled.

The markets have failed to rally behind the new administration’s economic policies with the Dow losing more than 800 points, about 10 percent of its value, since Barack Obama took office. For millions of Americans watching their retirement income, college funds and savings continue to disappear, it’s no surprise Obama’s extra $13 a week tax cut hasn’t provided the political boost his administration expected.

So, last week, the last thing this White House needed was a popular uprising in the form of a “Chicago Tea Party” protesting its new $75 billion housing bailout. This episode, which may not be over, is a reflection of a White House that has reached a structural decision point. Tonight’s historic address to Congress occurs at a time of great consternation and fear after what has been a tumultuous first month for this president.

In part, Obama’s problems stem from a political identity crisis. Is he the Obama who campaigned on a promise of new bipartisanship in Washington or the Obama who asked for Republican ideas and then let Pelosi and Reid ignore them?

Is he the self-described centrist of the campaign who promised to govern from the middle or the president who offered up a classic leftist spending bill, unique only in its breathtaking size.

For President Obama, tonight’s address has become more than an economic report card to Congress or even another attempt to sell his economic recovery plan. This address to Congress has become a structural positioning speech.

He must decide whether he is going to continue to pursue a single-party approach to governing based on the “we won” doctrine or embrace a true consensus approach to solving the nation’s serious problems. What much of Washington’s chattering class has forgotten in all the hype about partisanship over the past month is the fact that the majority party defines the level of bipartisanship, not the other way round.

Real bipartisanship means minority inclusion in both the legislative process and the final product. It isn’t a party at the White House and a free cocktail.

Over the past few weeks, many Democrats and pundits have seemed to suggest that accepting a social invitation from the president requires his “guests” abandon their principles at the door in gratitude, as if political philosophy were a matter of good manners. If that logic held true, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio) ought to have the president over for brats and beer and set the same expectations for an ideological flip from Obama.

The president deserves credit for at least talking to Republicans, but one phone call by Obama reining in Pelosi would have done far more to create the post-partisan Washington he promised. That call was never made.

Real bipartisanship is defined by whether and how much the majority will allow minority participation in the legislative process. Obama has another chance to begin again tonight to keep his promise. He has a choice.

Will he offer an agenda based on increased taxes on small business, more government spending, more government control of health care and cuts in defense spending, or will he try to create real consensus with an agenda that reflects all elements of American life and the ideas of both parties?

He can use this speech to structurally position himself on the left by appealing to his liberal base as he has done recently or he can embrace real bipartisanship and achieve a broad majority coalition. In November, the American people didn’t vote to change the country’s basic centrist, free-market principles; they voted for leadership they believed would focus on their problems and solve them.

This remains a center-right country. Tonight’s speech will tell us the kind of president Barack Obama intends to be.

David Winston is president of the Winston Group, a Republican polling firm.

Roll Call

When the control room erupted into chaos, Flight Director Gene Kranz told his team to settle down, “Let’s work the problem, people,” he said. “Let’s not make things worse by guessing.”

Last week, Rep. Dave Camp (Mich.), the top Ways and Means Republican, posed the following question to Thomas Barthold, deputy chief of staff of the Joint Committee on Taxation, at a hearing on the Democrats’ stimulus bill.

“Can you tell me, Mr. Barthold, how many jobs will be created by this legislation?”

Barthold answered, “Well, in short, Mr. Camp, I can’t.”

Having decided to focus this column on the New Deal logic of the Democrats’ latest economic stimulus bill, I gave some thought to ending the piece right here. Case made.

After all, if the raison d’être for this unprecedented, megabillion-dollar emergency spending package is to quickly stimulate the ailing economy, if its first objective is to create jobs or “save” them — the newest entry in the Democrats’ political lexicon — then isn’t it fair to ask how many jobs and how soon?

We’re still guessing. Originally, President Barack Obama and Hill Democrats had promised a “timely, targeted and temporary” recovery plan that would produce or save 2 million jobs. That figure, like the stimulus package itself, has grown to somewhere from 3 million to 4 million jobs depending on who’s talking and what time of day it is. And that’s the problem.

Despite all the promises of fast action to create millions of jobs, much of the $825 billion stimulus bill bears a striking resemblance to the annual Democratic budgetary wish list — but this time on steroids — and fails to meet the criteria of timely, targeted or temporary.

The Democrats’ own Congressional Budget Office shot holes in claims that the stimulus funding for job-creating projects would come fast and furious.

According to its recent report, which has now predictably been removed from its Web site, the CBO found that only $26 billion, or just 7 percent, of the major government spending in the legislation will see the light of day in 2009 and only 38 percent, or $110 billion, by the end of 2010.

To be fair, Obama’s OMB director disagrees with his own party’s Congressional analysis, as do Congressional Democrats, ironically, and predicts that 75 percent of the funding will be out the door creating jobs by the end of fiscal 2010. Again, one might ask the question, “Based on what?”

Anyone who has ever worked in the federal bureaucracy knows that regardless of who is president, it moves at a snail’s pace. Billions of dollars in grants to individuals, private groups and the states are doled out every year as part of the federal government’s normal budget process, and it takes months, if not years, to get the funds to qualifying recipients.

Why should we assume that the federal government will suddenly become a model of efficiency, getting stimulus checks out the Treasury door? While we now await a “revision” from the CBO, no doubt duly chastised by its Democratic bosses, chances are the CBO got it right the first time.

As we have seen with most government-created “infrastructure” projects going back to the Great Depression, they simply don’t fix the unemployment problem. The private sector does.

Okay, so the bill isn’t timely. What about targeted? When you’re spending $825 billion on everything from contraception to broadband communications, it’s difficult make that claim. Some of the proposed spending reflects some good thinking, putting money toward information technology in the health care arena or in underserved rural areas, for example.

But that kind of targeting ought to come through the annual appropriations process that allows time for serious debate and a healthy exchange of ideas. Instead, much of the spending, as it stands now, seems to be little more than gifts to important Democratic constituencies.

Finally, are the proposed programs and projects funded by the stimulus package temporary? At the 1964 GOP convention, Ronald Reagan said “a government bureau is the nearest thing to eternal life we’ll see here on earth.” Not much has changed.

The notion that the recovery legislation’s billions of dollars of programs and projects will simply disappear at some prescribed moment lacks credulity, especially given the recent Washington, D.C., track record of Democrats and Republicans.

When former President Bill Clinton proposed his politically useful “100,000 cops on the street” initiative to provide federal grants for hiring of new community-based cops, he made friends with mayors and police chiefs all across the country.

It was supposed to be a short-term, temporary program. It became a continuing federal grant program when local jurisdictions found themselves unable to pay new recruits’ salaries after the grants ran out. Are we supposed to believe that the “temporary” programs paid for by the stimulus package won’t run a similar course?

In the next couple of days, the Republican House leadership will offer Obama an alternative approach to the Democrats’ nearly trillion-dollar stimulus package. It will reflect a very different philosophy, a belief that small business remains the engine of American job creation. A quick review of the Democrats’ economic stimulus bill shows a party still clinging to the old idea, invalidated in the 1930s, that government is the best creator of long-term jobs.

Yes, elections have consequences, and as Obama pointed out to Hill Republicans in a White House meeting, he won. But victory and pork-barrel politics notwithstanding, he would be wise to listen to his own promises of change and open his mind to new ideas that might fit his own administration’s criteria of “timely, targeted and temporary.”

Original story on rollcall.com

Republican leaders are consciously muting their rhetoric against President-elect Barack Obama for now for fear of a public backlash as he enters the White House with sky-high approval ratings.

Even House Republicans, who have become significantly more conservative this year in makeup and in their leadership ranks, have largely held their fire at the behest of Minority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio), who has personally talked warmly about Obama and privately urged other Members to temper their rhetoric. In the Senate, Republicans are temporarily opting against all-out partisan warfare as they wait to see how Democratic leaders will run the chamber in the weeks and months ahead.

In the House, Boehner and other leaders have talked behind the scenes, including at last weekend’s leadership retreat, about making a distinction between Obama and Congressional Democrats — who are much less popular than Obama and are already tightening the rights of the minority in contrast to Obama’s message of bipartisanship.

The strategy already appears to be paying some dividends in that Obama has moved in the GOP’s direction on some tax cuts in the stimulus package and has continued a serious effort to reach out to Republicans. Obama also helped get commitments from Democratic leaders, including Speaker Nancy Pelosi (Calif.), for an open process on the stimulus package with Republican opportunities for input.

“Republicans’ best friend right now is Obama because Pelosi ends up getting triangulated,” said Ron Bonjean, chief executive officer of the Bonjean Co. and one-time spokesman for former Speaker Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.). “Pelosi right now is promoting martial law and taking away minority rights while Obama is casting himself as bipartisan.”

Obama also accepted an invitation from House GOP leaders to address their conference, likely within three weeks after his inauguration.

That doesn’t mean the honeymoon will last forever, or that the GOP won’t quickly point out their differences with Obama, especially when he fleshes out his agenda later this year.

Indeed, Boehner, Minority Whip Eric Cantor (Va.) and other Republicans have been publicly wary of Obama’s spending plans, charging that the country can’t spend its way to prosperity.

But the criticisms have lacked a sharp sting, for now.

“If Republicans attack too early and don’t give him a chance to govern, we come off as sore losers and lose any credibility that we’re rebuilding,” Bonjean said.

Rob Collins, Cantor’s chief of staff, said “it would be simply irrelevant if we were destructive at this point,” noting that Obama hasn’t come out with many specifics to react against and has instead made overtures to Republicans.
“If Obama’s willing to give us a couple hundred billions of dollars in tax cuts, then we’ll talk,” Collins said, adding that Obama has to deal with the liberal wing of his party. “He’ll have more problems with his liberal left than with conservatives in the first six months.”

Republicans said there will be plenty of time later in Obama’s term to attack Democrats for the inevitable excesses that come with one-party rule.

Republican leaders also are buying into the idea that they need to focus on providing alternatives and solutions to appeal to the American people, rather than on attacks, with last year’s debate over oil drilling as one model for success.

To that end, Boehner tasked Cantor to head a working group on the economy that will meet Thursday, with other similar efforts to come.

“We’ve got to start talking to people about ideas and solutions and how to get things done, and then we can talk about the politics and who deserves to run the place,” Collins said.

GOP consultant David Winston, who advises House Republicans, said last year’s successful energy protest could prove a model for the new Republicans because it was focused on solutions and a clear choice rather than partisan attacks.

“Just simply being the ‘party of no’ is not the way to prove you can govern,” said Winston, who is also a Roll Call contributing writer. Republican leaders “believe if you are going to prove you are ready to govern, you better have something better as an approach.

“It’s not about defining your opponent per se, it’s about defining what the choice is,” Winston said. “That will produce a different tone as a result.”

Meanwhile, Senate Republicans also appear to be cooling their heels as they wait for Majority Leader Harry Reid’s (D-Nev.) next moves on the floor.

With a bare minimum of Senators — 41 — giving them the ability to filibuster, Republicans said they realize they cannot operate as they did in the 110th Congress, where they blocked many otherwise bipartisan bills because Reid would not allow GOP Senators to offer amendments.

“We’re outnumbered, and we’ve got limited resources. We’ve got to pick our battles,” one senior Senate GOP aide said.

That dynamic was on vivid display Sunday, when Reid forced a rare weekend vote on a package of lands bills that had been held up for years by Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.). Coburn had attempted to get Reid to agree to a finite list of amendments, but Reid used procedural moves to block out any GOP proposals from being considered.
Last year, that tactic spelled instant death for the measure as it failed to garner enough votes to bring it up. But this time, nine Republicans joined all Democrats in rolling over Coburn’s objections.

“I don’t think that this was one our leaders wanted to pick a fight on, but I think there will be times that we will and we’re going to have to or this is going to become the norm rather than the exception,” said GOP Conference Vice Chairman John Thune (S.D.), who was the highest- ranking Republican leader to attend the vote.

One Republican Senator acknowledged that the absence of Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (Ky.) and other high-ranking GOP Senators on Sunday was a clear signal that Republicans were allowed to vote however they liked on the lands package — a stark departure from the past two years.

And Republican Senators said they were not concerned that Reid appeared to be starting the 111th Congress like the 110th ended, despite Reid’s repeated promises to run the Senate floor in a more bipartisan manner.
“I could act like this was some big deal, but it’s been going on now for about four years,” Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.) said of the long-standing feud between Reid and Coburn over the lands bill. “I do think that you will find unity on issues regarding protecting minority rights. I think you will definitely see that this year, but this one again, has a long history.”

A former GOP leadership aide said: “What we’re going to see right now is a period of every man for himself.”
The former aide explained that given their reduced numbers and Reid’s apparent willingness to use his majority to push through legislation, lawmakers will, at least in the short term, be more likely to abandon their traditional loyalty to the party if Democrats give them enough incentives.

In the case of the public lands package, Reid was sure to stock it with bills that had at least one Republican as a primary sponsor and that were a high priority in their home states.

A current GOP leadership aide acknowledged Democrats should generally be able to find a way to avoid a filibuster. “Anybody with a bill can find a way to get two votes,” the aide said.

Senate Republican Conference Chairman Lamar Alexander (Tenn.) indicated that he is waiting for Reid to show he is serious about allowing more GOP amendments on the floor this time around.

“This business of the Majority Leader using his authority to prevent amendments, to prevent debate, we hope we don’t see this” during the 111th Congress, Alexander said.

John Stanton contributed to this report.

Original article on rollcall.com

The note supposedly said, “To my successor: When you find yourself in a hopeless situation, open the first letter and it will save you. Later, when you again find yourself in a hopeless situation, open the second letter.”

Sure enough, his replacement, Leonard Brezhnev, soon had reason to open the first letter. It said, “Blame it all on me.” That’s what the new party leader did, and it saved his job. Later, he found himself in a similarly dire situation and supposedly grasped for Khrushchev’s second letter as he desperately looked for a solution.

He ripped open the letter and read Khrushchev’s final words of advice: “Sit down and write two letters.” It’s a story, let’s hope, President-elect Barack Obama has heard. The moral of the story is, of course, honeymoons don’t last forever and Obama’s will be over when he “owns” the economy, for better or worse.

As he is about to take office, however, most of America is willing to give him the honeymoon every president gets; but for much of Washington’s political and media insiders, the clock has already started running.

A presidential honeymoon is usually unpredictable, much like the real thing. Its length depends on the personalities involved and promises made during the campaign, the tenor of the times, and the political environment in which the new president must lead. For John F. Kennedy, the glamour of his candidacy and the drama of the Cuban missile crisis overcame the Bay of Pigs fiasco, and he enjoyed a honeymoon that continues to this day.

For Bill Clinton, the honeymoon was short-lived. By the end of May 1993, a series of political missteps had dragged his numbers down to 36 percent approval and 50 percent disapproval.

For Obama, however, Ronald Reagan’s early months and years in office may provide not only be a better analogy to current times but a cautionary tale about when a national recession becomes a president’s personal millstone. Reagan assumed the presidency with America in a severe economic crisis, dispirited by the long Iran hostage situation and threatened by a belligerent Soviet Union.

In the economic debate of the past few months, we have forgotten the grim economic legacy Reagan inherited. The inflation rate was nearly 12 percent. Today, it’s less than 2 percent. Interest rates were running at double digits with home mortgages as high as 15 percent. Today, a traditional 30-year mortgage averages around 5.5 percent.

The unemployment rate in January 1981 was at 7.5 percent, even higher than today’s 7.2 percent, and people were reeling not only from high gas prices but long lines as well. This isn’t to say that Obama isn’t inheriting a very difficult economic situation, but Reagan faced an equally daunting economic challenge.

On Jan. 20, 1981, however, people didn’t view it as Reagan’s recession. It was Jimmy Carter’s, and the American people understood that. Reagan took over the presidential reins with a job approval of 51 percent and 13 percent disapproval.

Obama will begin his presidency with high favorable ratings as well. A mid- December USA Today/Gallup poll found 75 percent of the American people approved of his handling of the transition. Rasmussen Reports put his job approval at 67/30 in its daily tracking on Monday.

He will also benefit from the fact that today, Americans blame the struggling economy on George W. Bush, but if the early years of Reagan’s presidency offer any insight on honeymoons, it is that voters are an impatient lot. For Reagan, his honeymoon faded in less than a year.

By December 1981, he had slipped to 49 approval/41 disapproval. What had been Carter’s recession just a year before was now becoming Reagan’s political albatross as his favorable ratings began a steady slide that continued throughout the year. Reagan now “owned” the economy and his political fortunes were tied to it.

When unemployment hit 10 percent in October 1982, his job approval dipped to 42/48. A month later, Republicans lost 26 seats in the House and a raft of governorships and state legislatures.

Time magazine’s post-election issue characterized voters’ mind-set this way: “The message read: reduce unemployment, bring down the deficit. The President was being told what practically all U.S. Presidents are told two years after their chiefdom is hailed: no mandate is forever. In presidential elections one votes for the sky. In off-year elections one looks at the street.”

Obama will face the same kind of assessment two years from now, but unlike Reagan, who had to work with a Democratically controlled House, voters understand that Democrats now control Washington. Obama’s policy prescription for what ails the economy appears to be roughly the same New Deal government spending approach offered by Franklin Roosevelt in his first term and by Democrats in Reagan’s.

Republicans would be wise to work with the new president by offering alternative plans and programs that will provide evidence of the stark differences that exist between the two parties’ economic policies. It’s important to remember that in 1938, years after billions of dollars had been invested in government “work” programs, the unemployment rate was more than 19 percent.

In the end, Obama and his party’s success or failure in the 2010 Congressional elections will depend on two factors: when the American people decide that this has become President Obama’s economy, and how the economy is doing at that moment. Obama can blame Bush; but as Brezhnev discovered, he can’t blame his predecessor forever.

Original story at rollcall.com

The truth is, voters don’t want to hear why the other guy is bad. They want to know why you are a better choice. People want hear how candidates will govern, how they will solve problems and what they really stand for.

Former Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) put it this way: “Wal-Mart doesn’t get ahead by attacking Sears but by offering better value.” In the past two elections, Republicans failed to win over voters because they failed to tell them how they would address their concerns.

The GOP has spent the past 10 years and hundreds of millions of dollars trying to drive up Democrats’ negatives. Sometimes they succeeded, but rather than solidifying the GOP’s majority coalition, over time, this self-defeating strategy made it permanently vulnerable. Republicans found themselves with razor-thin victories, no mandate to govern and growing unfavorable ratings.

Rothenberg also argued that Congressional Republicans were forced to employ a negative attack strategy because sitting presidents and presidential nominees define a party, not Congressional candidates. He’s half right.

Yes, President George W. Bush’s job approval was a significant drag on the ticket. But it is possible for a ruling party to overcome an unpopular incumbent. Just ask France’s President Nicolas Sarkozy, who managed to win election despite the huge unpopularity of fellow party member and former President Jacques Chirac.

He did it by making a clean break with Chirac’s policies and offering up a positive agenda of his own. Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), however, failed to convince voters that he had a viable plan to deal with an increasingly troubled economy. Instead, he predictably fell back on a politics-as-usual attack strategy to define Obama rather than define himself and his vision to voters.

Instead of focusing on the merits of his own tax plan or trying to make his health care plan comprehensible, his campaign relied on unserious, negative ads like the “sex ed ad” questioning Obama’s character. It didn’t work.

As Daniel Finkelstein observed in the London Times about the McCain campaign’s attack spots, “They are ignoring a golden rule of politics. Your attack ads also shape views of you. Whether or not the [the Britney Spears/Paris Hilton ad] makes Mr. Obama look smaller, it certainly makes John McCain look smaller.”

In fact, it is possible to overcome a negative national political environment and do it without resorting to harsh personal attacks.

Rep. Mark Souder (R-Ind.) is a good example. Rothenberg attributes his victory to negative attacks on his Democratic opponent. I did the polling for this race and saw the dynamics in play up close.

Souder spent 2007 and the first half of 2008 building his positives with voters. During the campaign, he spent half his time reinforcing those positives and the other half defining a choice by drawing a fair and effective contrast with his opponent’s qualifications and issue positions.

This was not, however, a traditional “negative” attack campaign. First, it was a balanced approach of positive and contrast tactics. Second, Souder’s campaign reflected the distinction between a contrast ad that defines a substantive choice between two candidates based on issues or résumés as opposed to over-the-top negative spots questioning a candidate’s integrity and morals in a personal way.

In recent losing elections, we’ve seen more of the latter, and it has negatively impacted the Republican brand. Former Sen. Rick Santorum (R-Pa.) was ill-served when his campaign ran a spot that implied now-Sen. Bob Casey (D-Pa.), as state treasurer, had invested state funds in organizations with alleged ties to terrorists. It was ridiculous, and it backfired.

The same could be said of the famous “blond bimbo” ad against Democratic Rep. Harold Ford Jr. in the 2006 Tennessee Senate race, aired by the Republican National Committee and without now-Sen. Bob Corker’s knowledge. Internal polling showed the ad cost Corker his lead and made the race much more competitive than it should have been.

The attack on now-Sen. Jim Webb (D) in the Virginia Senate race as a purveyor of pornography and the “godless” ad used in Sen. Elizabeth Dole’s (R-N.C.) losing reelection battle are still more egregious examples of the kind of attack media Republicans must reject.

For too many operatives, when it comes to campaign strategy, defining the opponent isn’t one option; it’s the only option. But there is another way. We’ve seen a model that worked for Republicans — the energy issue — even in the very negative political environment of the past year.

By coalescing behind a strong idea, Republicans were able to win this issue, not through an attack strategy designed to define Democrats but by positively arguing their case to the American people for an “all-of-the-above” energy policy. It was a good first step on the road back from the wilderness that we can learn from.

Republicans won’t regain a majority coalition until they reject attack-based campaigns and prove Republicans are ready to govern by first winning issues.

Unquestionably, there were elements of truth in those complaints — Bush’s job approval was a significant drag on the ticket, for example, and some of the media did take sides in the presidential contest on a whole new level. But, just as it did in the 2006 elections and three special elections for House seats that followed, the Republican Party fundamentally misunderstood the root cause of its failure to maintain a majority coalition: an inability to articulate a positive agenda that connected with voters.

Instead, the blame was placed on everyone and everything but the issue-less, relentlessly negative campaigns that party operatives have promoted for years; campaigns aimed almost entirely at turning out an angry base rather than appealing to a broader coalition.

This year, the same players dragged out the same, tired negative campaign strategy and, not surprisingly, the party hit a brick wall. As Albert Einstein liked to say, “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”

To rebuild its winning coalition, the party must change, not by jettisoning its core principles but by using those principles to create a modern Republican Party, in touch once again with a country that remains center-right. Some party leaders and pundits have suggested the GOP has simply lost its way.

All it has to do to regain majority status, by their reckoning, is return to the principles of Ronald Reagan. But that thinking is based on revisionist history.

Reagan didn’t create Republican principles in the late 1970s. He crafted a modernized agenda based on those principles, but one that reflected the challenges of his time. For example, Reagan embraced the traditional Republican principle of less government regulation, but applied it to create a new environment that encouraged innovation and allowed the emerging technology industry to take off.

Reagan provides a good model. When it came to setting his agenda, he relied on a set of core values, but he wasn’t afraid of changing technologies or changing times. He embraced them, pushed bold solutions and made history.

The world today, however, is very different from the one Reagan inherited nearly 30 years ago. The GOP must develop a modern agenda that acknowledges those differences, addresses the key concerns of this generation of Americans and keeps the country strong and competitive.

Yes, we must remain true to our basic principles. Yes, we can look back for inspiration. But we must look forward for solutions that reflect the challenges of these times. And as we do, we must build that modern Republican agenda in a more inclusive way if the party is to have a long-term future.

The GOP cannot remain viable if it continues to sustain the kind of losses we saw this year with younger voters, Hispanics, middle-income voters and other key swing voters. The modern Republican agenda must connect with more than the base.

Along with accepting the need for a forward- looking, inclusive, modernized agenda, it’s time the party also embraces a modern approach to campaigns. The negative campaign strategy, tactics and training that have characterized Republican operations for most of the past two decades are more than outdated. They simply don’t work.

In fact, one could argue, at this point, they are doing more harm than good.

Is it any surprise that the Republican brand has become so negative when, over the past three election cycles, national Republican committees and individual campaigns have chosen to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on negative ads rather than promoting Republican ideas and candidates in a positive way?

On the National Republican Congressional Committee’s YouTube site, not one ad in the 60 highlighted on its first couple of video pages offered a positive view of the party or individual Republican House candidates. In 2008 as it did in 2006, the party squandered millions and, more importantly, a crucial opportunity to have a conversation with the American people about what Republicans would do to solve their problems.

What we have here is a “failure to communicate” on all fronts, especially when it comes to the new media technology. From YouTube to Twitter to the blogosphere to building effective e-mail lists, the GOP is significantly behind.

Building a new media capability must be a top priority of the incoming heads of the party committees. So should a revamping of the education and training programs that turn out young campaign operatives steeped in the mythology of negative campaigning and the antiquated notion that all politics is local.

These future leaders of the party must understand that ideas matter, that voters today are looking for leaders with positive solutions, and that nationalized elections are the new reality in the age of the new media.

If acceptance is the last phase of the five stages of grief, then it’s time Republicans moved on to this reality: A modern, future-oriented Republican agenda based on core principles and supported by a modern Republican Party is the way out of the wilderness.