Conservatives in Crisis.

• Author: Conniff, Ruth
• Position: Political Eye - Viewpoint essay

Pity the Republican Party. After eight years of misrule, conservatives are facing ideological bankruptcy. By any measure, their cherished ideals have failed. Deregulation, tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy, massive military intervention in Iraq--all of these have gotten an unequivocal thumbs-down. Hence the massive, cathartic outpouring of relief at regime change in Washington.

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But wait! "Harry Truman had low approval ratings," a Republican former lieutenant governor of Wisconsin informed me recently, huffing about perceived rudeness to the unlamented George W. Bush in a post-Inaugural radio show. The same holds for Abraham Lincoln, she added: unpopular during the Civil War, but now remembered as a great President.

This is true desperation: to hope that, somehow, through the magic lens of history, driving the U.S. economy off a cliff and burying us in a protracted and fruitless war in Iraq will appear shrewd and farsighted.

In fact, historians are already arguing over whether Bush is the very worst or merely the second- or third-worst President in history.

Not just liberal history professors, but conservative intellectuals acknowledge that Bush's failures have had far-reaching, historic implications for the entire conservative movement.

"All good things must come to an end," sighed neocon William Kristol in his final effort as a columnist for The New York Times . "January 20, 2009, marked the end of a conservative era," Kristol declared. He left aside the pesky matter of his own massive error in judgment about the Iraq War, and instead opted for a vague, valedictory statement: "Conservatives have been right more often than not." Now it's up to Obama, he declared, to "save" liberalism, bring back the glory days of FDR, and turn the country around.

Gee, thanks, Bill. Don't let the door hit you in the butt.

If the more genteel, intellectual figures on the right like Kristol acknowledge that they are out of ideas, and even seem willing to turn back the clock sixty years to the New Deal era, the modern equivalents of Joe McCarthy are sharpening their knives.

Ann Coulter is on a book tour, promoting the idea that the New Deal was an economic disaster, and that liberals are traitors, liars, and despots.

And here is Rush Limbaugh, playing long sections from one of Roosevelt's fireside chats on his radio show, and then reacting, ballistically, to Roosevelt's assertion that there is "an individual right" to health care...