Californian present.

In a column from early May, Ross Douthat articulates what's missing in today's GOP:

This sort of politics will always be with us, and no doubt Mainers, in particular, are grateful that their senators are so good at the Senate’s backroom politics. But the idea that peeling a $100 billion dollars off whatever the Democrats ask for and declaring victory represents some kind of path forward for a reeling Republican Party is risible.

This doesn’t mean that Republicans should be happy that their tent is shrinking toward political irrelevance. But more Lincoln Chafees and Olympia Snowes aren’t the answer. What’s required instead is a better sort of centrist. The Reagan-era wave of Republican policy innovation — embodied, among others, by the late Jack Kemp — has calcified in much the same way that liberalism calcified a generation ago. And so in place of hacks and deal-makers, the Republican Party needs its own version of the neoliberals and New Democrats — reform-minded politicians like Gary Hart and Bill Clinton, who helped the Democratic Party recover from the Reagan era, instead of just surviving it.

Hart, Clinton and their peers were critical of their own side’s orthodoxies, but you couldn’t imagine them jumping ship to join the Republicans. They were deeply rooted in liberal politics, but they had definite ideas for how the Democratic Party could learn from its mistakes, and from its opponents, in order to further liberalism’s deeper goals.

No equivalent faction — rooted in conservatism, but eager for innovation — exists in the Republican Party today. ...
(T)o succeed, such a faction will have to represent something legitimately new in right-of-center politics. It can’t sound like Rush Limbaugh — but it can’t sound like Arlen Specter either.

And what will this new faction be charged with?

Hard choices, cleanup duty. The walk that trumps the talk.

And on a broader level, I’m more sympathetic than many conservatives to liberal complaints about America’s growing ungovernability. Unlike the left, I’m not worried about a liberal Congress’s inability to pass a public option — but I am worried that our political culture is ill-equipped to deal with the looming gulf between our projected revenues and our spending commitments.

Note that most of the bills listed above attracted supermajority support while either cutting taxes or hiking spending. (The pending health care legislation promises to pay for itself, but everyone, from the CBO on down, is taking that promise with a substantial grain of salt.)

This trend can’t continue: In the next decade or so, we’ll need to either raise taxes, cut spending, or both, or else the American future will resemble the Californian present. And anyone who thinks that Congress is ready to make those kind of hard choices hasn’t been paying attention to our politics lately.