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You said it all. Great post. I'd love to see the GOP pass larger tax cuts and slash government programs immediately - but I realize there are political realities. Give the people a taste of lower taxes and show them they don't need government to babysit them, and they will come to your side. Try to radically change the course of this nation overnight and the electorate will toss you out of office, if you ever get there in the first place.

The left understands the principle of incrementalism, but I often wonder whether those on the right grasp it at all.

It would do us (on the right) well to remember that the only election in the last 10 years where our side gained ground was in 1994. 1994 was the result of one thing -- Democrats with extreme hubris (imagine that from a group led by Clinton!!) attempting to promote an extreme left agenda (tax increases followed hard by the "nail-in-the-coffin" overtly-socialized medicine). In the blush of their one victory (1992), the Rats were overwhelmed by their own sense of power-entitlement. And they governed to their convictions and away from the mushy middle.

And the Republicans crushed them. (Gingrich gets plenty of credit here, because found every open wound, and every "scandal" from the abuse of power, that the Democrats had left open -- and he rubbed salt hard into each one of those open wounds. But even without Gingrich, the Republicans would have won that election).

I'm sorry if some get offended, but you have to keep the passive mushy massive middle of a huge nation comfortable. They are not comfortable with anything that smacks of extremism. This is where the left has been effective -- slowly, through schools and media and entertainment, changed the minds of the population just enough to make many of their truly wacky ideas mainstream -- ideas that would have been extremism if they had attempted to impose them through government fiat.

Since 1994, the Democrats have not erred in that way again and they have slowly eaten away at the Republican gains, because they DO represent the strongest plurality (not majority, plurality) in this generation. The Republicans have not really "won" an election outright since 1994. They have, through a well-run campaign, through a relatively weak Rat candidate and through the "thousand small cuts" of a sordid scandal, by the barest of margins managed to "guerilla" in a President. One who is now very popular. Hopefully, fortune is with us again, but I'd be more comfortable seeing the Rats make a few mistakes, just to be sure.

You may be too young to remember it, but there was this radical conservative group of Congressmen in 1994 who won a landslide and almost changed the course of history by doing precisely that.

They only lost when Newt Gingrich caved to Clinton in the so-called "government shutdown." Until that point, every leftist law prof in the country was literally shaking and crying over the return of the Republic.