Charles Krauthammer writes:

After all, if even Goldman Sachs was getting government protection, why not you? And offering the comfort and safety of government is the Democratic Party’s vocation. With a Republican White House having partially nationalized the banks and just about everything else, McCain’s final anti-Obama maneuver — Joe the Plumber spread-the-wealth charges of socialism — became almost comical.

There’s an incorrect premise here. “The comfort and safety of government” is not the same as a “smart government” that can fulfill its core duties to a people and solve problems. This is not a “smart” reading of the things Johnson got right. No political party, even the hard-core libertarian branches, can claim a definition of “limited” to mean agnostic or bumbling.

I heard someone on FreshAir yesterday claim that the new differences between the parties is a matter of emphasis regarding a reformulated GOP. This seems trite and overly ambiguous. Even Kevin Drum offers wrinkled logic. He writes, “The public face of his [Obama’s] economic policy, after all, was almost entirely based on tax cuts, a distinctly conservative notion.” I must have missed something, but when did either political party grow intrinsic qualities? The last 30 or so years of GOP ideas has not centered on tax cuts but line items on forms. Has the question been: we need to fix the Democratic Party and now the Republican simply because we must? Both sides claim perversion as the problem with the antagonist, as Krauthammer proves above, with lots of vigorous slanting.

The real questions are: how do we put a new roof on that school? How do we use and learn more about the gene?