Ross Douthat: How To Read Republicans' Opportunity

Alan: My view of Douthat's proposal remains the same as it was when Michael Gerson made an analogous proposal. http://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2013/11/saving-republican-party-by-michael.html

"[Sen. Mike] Lee is clearly offering a sketch, an outline, of a conservatism that reaches for the middle, it's a different middle, with different priorities, than the one Fournier and so many others have chided the G.O.P. for failing to embrace. And this, as I've tried to argue before, is the real political opportunity available to Republicans in the last three years of the Obama presidency. Precisely because the party has swung away so sharply from the conventional, Beltway-approved center in the Tea Party era, it now has an opportunity to swing back into a different space than the one that centrist politicians of both parties have tended to occupy in the last two decades -- and in the process, either create a genuinely new right-of-center majority, or at the very least offer Americans the kind of alternative to current elite fixations that the country lacks, needs, and deserves." Ross Douthat in The New York Times