Can you say it?

On the one hand, there is something to be said for sticking to your principles rather than compromising just to win elections.  In the long run, that is often more helpful than selling out for the sake of one 2- or 4-year cycle.

However, the Republicans' core principles are unlikely, in my opinion, to suddenly come back in vogue.  

1) A commitment to faith-based reasoning at the expense of hard science (see global warming, renewable energy, evolution).

2) Uncritical, unilateral support for Israel, based partly upon eschatological/endtimes beliefs, specifically that peace in Israel will usher in the Rapture.

3) A relatively harsh anti-immigration stance that ignores changing demographics.

4) Little attempt to understand, or care about, non-dominant culture, especially those of young people, urban African Americans, and Hispanics.

All of these are going to be more problematic in the future.  When (if?) the economy turns around, it is possible that the idea of low-taxes, small-government could become wildly popular again.  But the four above are very unlikely to be net positives in the coming years and decades.

1) The Western world, including America, has been trending away from religion, especially any strict belief in the accuracy of the Bible.

2) Support for Israel will likely remain strong (as I think it should), but it will be increasingly based on non-religious reasoning.  Specifically, Americans will increasingly ask to what extent uncritical support of Israel does for our own security.  

3) The increase in the numbers of Hispanics in America speaks for itself, as many will increasingly harbor resentment against an immigration policy that is (and is widely perceived as) anti-Latino.

4) Losing young people, and being wholly unwilling to embrace technology, is going to be a huge problem going forward.  Also, as many of the culture wars only 50/50 (ish) when America is a country where almost everyone is a Christian, the trend away from religion also likely means most of the Culture Wars are going to be over after the next decade (abortion, marijuana, gay marriage, separation of church and state).

That being said, I can understand why Republicans do not (and cannot) suddenly sacrifice all of these principles en masse.  For their own sake, though, they will need to learn to change gradually if they want to be relevant.

all they have is Reagan. They have followed a single orthodoxy for so long that they're incapable of generating new policy.

For all our fractious (and sometimes hysterical) contentiousness, Liberals are constantly evaluating and reevaluating. Elect a Catholic! A Southern Governor! A Black Dude! Wind Energy! Infrastructure! We're always trying the next thing.

I'm not sure the GOP can really do anything different at this point, and remain the GOP.

Don't these people understand that their strategy isn't working?

No.

http://www.bleedingheartland.com/showDia ry.do?diaryId=2381

The big problem the GOP is facing is that the goalposts have shifted more dramatically to the left than even many on the left thought possible.  People have discarded conservative trickle-down economics as colossal failures and are entrusting their economic future to the Democratic party.  The pitfall is that we have to show that we can do it better, overall, but for now we are in a strong position.  

The GOP is basically depending on and banking on Democrats to fail to get the economy stabilized, so they can gain relevance again.  They know that if Democrats are successful in bringing the economy back to an extent and in passing and enacting a universal health care system that people are likely to embrace the Democrats even more and discard GOP principles as failures.  

With each new obstruction or attempted obstruction of our government's just, functional (i.e., not dysfunctional) progress since 2006, I find myself cheering the GOP thus: Swiftly, onward to your ultimate, self-imposed and absolute Obsolescence... and Thank You for listening.

Short answer to your question about the conservatives who remain in the GOP members of Congress: No.

From a politicial history perspective, how long did it take the Democrats to realize that things had changed in the 1980s? I would argue they did not substantive change strategies until 1992 with the election of Clinton.

For that matter, how long is it taking for the Democrats now to realize that the Reagan revolution is mostly dead? I would argue that this has not yet occured, and will not occur until a subsequent revolution the equivalent of the 1994 revolution of the Republicans in Congress.

I am thinking this will not occur for one or two more election cycles as the present leadership either moves on or is moved on.

We are in the early stages of a Democratic majority. It will take almost a decade to consolidate that power with new world views becoming the cw. The American public , as always with this, is a few years ahead of the Congress and even the President.

On one hand, no one is above 50%.

On the other hand, to some extent the point of a political party is to win elections by selling the public on the notion that your candidates are trustworthy and your ideas are right, not to get jobs for placeholders whose positions are indistinguishable from those of another party's.

The Democratic Party did not regain government by endorsing torture, extraordinary rendition, and universal wiretapping.  And if it had, what would have been the point?

The Republicans have a similar answer.  Their party is there to represent their opinions, not progressive democratic thinking, not your opinion or my opinion (allowing none of us are Huckabee Republicans -- if you are, your party is there to represent your opinion, and you should be proud when it does so well, and incidentally when it puts forward candidates who would competently put your positions into effect.)

My last point goes equally for every other political party.

Republicans are a religious based party. Even the non-religious Republicans are religious in the sense that they have faith in free markets. Their rigid "My way or the highway" ideology is compounded by the fact that the bulk of Republican politicians belong to the Baby Boom generation, a generation that is attracted to rigid ideology.

The nation is tired of the Republicans trying to ram down their rigid ideology down their throats. their leadership has failed and they respond by becoming even more rigid.

If not a single Republican can agree to vote for the stimulus bill even after Obama's good-will concessions, then its time to take back the concessions, twist a few arms to get the 60 votes needed in the senate, and ram the bill down their throats.

The Republicans are between a rock and a hard place right now. A lot of the positions they support are unpopular with a significant if not vast majority of the populace, especially in the social issues realm. Worse, they are definitely unpopular with a VAST majority of younger voters (age 18-29), as demonstrated by Obama's overwhelming victory in that demographic. So it's bad and the trendlines are worse if something doesn't change with them (or for them, such as some strongly Democratic-backed legislation or issue(s) dramatically backfire).

It's true, as one commentor pointed out, that the generic Democratic candidate polls under 50 percent, primarily I think due to the fact that so many (27 percent) gave a "don't know" response, reflective I think of continued mega-election-coverage-dominance burnout/hangover. But the aspirin is slowly taking effect.

What seems truly astounding is that the generic Republic Party (snark) candidate polls a mere 22%, below even the anemic Bush approval numbers for the last year or so of his Presidency. That's remarkable.

The major problem for them at this point - let's use ProgressiveDL's numbers and assumptions for a minute - is that the demographic strongly pushing what are becoming generally and increasingly unpopular positions, especially in the social/cultural issues realm, are religious conservatives. If the 39% of Americans that attend church weekly roughly represent the religious conservative base (I suspect the proportion of RC's is a bit less than that in reality), that makes them a significant minority of the populace... but a majority of the Republic party, not to mention that they are the demographic most willing and able to throw money at the party's election campaigns. So they are able to control the Republic Party's platform if they have the will and stamina to do so, as they seem always to have.

At this point, it seems the Republic Party's best option is to try to move their hearts and minds more toward libertarian ideas (or at least toward policies that maximize individual freedoms even if some government intervention is needed to do so); party leaders can push ideas at the RC leaders and rank/file like...

(a) government-backed imposition of religiously-based values can backfire if the precedent is set and an anti-religious faction takes power; the best way to assure your own freedom to worship and believe as you see fit is to guarantee that for all people and faiths.

(b) abortion can be pragmatically reduced if we work with more moderate politicians to put policies in place that reduce the conditions that give rise to their need in the first place, rather than putting all our efforts toward a militant but consistently fruitless goal of reversing Roe v. Wade by any means necessary.

(c) they must push to divorce themselves from the idea that when government makes something legal, that it de facto renders some sort of cultural impramatur on that which is legalized (such as, making abortion legal implies government and cultural support for abortions; teaching detailed and accurate sex education in schools means the government and "America" supports teenagers having sex; legalizing gay marriage means the government and the country as a whole are promoting it as a good alternative lifestyle; etc.). The purpose of laws and whatever amount of governmental structure we Republics support is to maximize freedom to allow everyone their "pursuit of happiness" and extend opportunity to everyone as much as possible. And by making this the point of governmental action (rather than some sort of moral 'thumbs up') we guarantee our own right to spread the word of God and live in the manner that we see fit.

I could go on but you get my drift (actually, you probably did several paragraphs ago and have now entered the MEGO phase). Right now I don't see any other way for the Republics to maintain the support of RC's while making their platform more palatable to the rest of America, especially the younger generations now overwhelmingly supporting Democratic policies

Actually the behavior of the Republicans in the House is easy to understand.  House districts have been so gerrymandered that the vast majority of members have to appeal to the extremes to be elected.  The moderate and reasonable conservative Republican members have been voted out over the last two elections.  All that's left are the right wing extremists, whose districts are so drawn that only right wing extremists can win.  Even if they recognize the problems their party faces nationally, they have no incentive to change if they want to be re-elected.

That's why there tends to be a lot more reasonable people in the Senate, since they have to appeal to a broader base to get elected with the exception of a very few states.  Senate Republicans will try to move their party off an untenable position, but are likely to fail given the 2010 playing field.

It will probably take a major Democratic screw-up to bring the Republicans back.  And note, it took TWO terms of Bush to knock them down.  Nothing in his second term should have surprised viewers of his first term, yet his party maintained total control in 2004 anyway!  So even if we flub it, it will likely take a good number of years for them to recover.