David Brooks' column today contains two unshakable misapprehensions which only serve to undermine and thus demolish his otherwise sensible theme of reachable two-party cooperation.
Republicans [will] ... spend 2012 accusing the Democrats of sponsoring death panels. The Democrats will spend 2012 accusing Republicans of ending Medicare. Whichever party demagogues best wins.
The parties may indeed devote their efforts to death panels and Medicare as threatened. The first bugaboo, however, is just that: it's entirely imaginary. The second is nothing of the sort; it is imposingly real. To equate both as "demagogic" is but willful partisan spin that encourages no honest debate.
Republicans won in 2010 because the working class fled from the Democrats’ top-down big government liberalism.
Republicans won in 2010 because the electorate threw a mindless temper tantrum over chronic joblessness -- a national circumstance attributable to the GOP's appalling economic record and, then, stimulus-spending intransigence. Now the electorate is paying for its sin of detachment. The larger point within the context of Brooks, though, is that, once again, the denial of reality is immensely unhelpful.
That a staid, Burkean conservative who undoubtedly knows reality better than this, and yet is willing to so carelessly molest it, shows just how panicked the GOP is about its own realistic prospects.