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between Gerson and Frum, you can see where some of the problems came from during the Bush administration. He had way too many pansy lightweights surrounding him in key communication positions. Once Ari left, the wheels came off and the message was never the same. Both Tony Snow and Dana Perino have done a solid job on their own, but it did not spread beyond their press conferences. The message was lost.

In one sense you are right. The founders recognized that human nature was such that if you give humans power, they will abuse it. So they set up a government that kept the power in the federal government not only small, but offset by other sources of power.

But they kept in place the State governments, almost completely intact, which regulated (or did not regulate) the vast majority of human conduct. The founders also recognized that human nature was such that if it is given unfettered license to behave any way it wants, will inevitably produce behavior that disintegrates the culture. And that effective government depends on a mostly moral and honest culture. So human moral behavior was left to the states and only very limited enumerated powers were granted to the feds.

The founders were the ultimate conservatives (in the modern sense of the word). They were not liberatarians in the modern sense of the word. They saw no problem with state laws prohibiting alcohol use, sodomy, divorce etc.

So it’s a little oversimplified to just say conservatives are for smaller government always and that is the heart of conservatism. Conservatives I think, stand for the smallest government that will preserve the state and the culture, consistent with what we know about human nature. And that’s the split between modern libertarianism and conservatism—libertarians make, I believe, deeply unjustified assumptions about the salutory effects of eliminating almost all state constraints on moral behavior. That error is mostly due to an impossibly rosy view of human nature. And in that sense, liberatarians and communists make the same mistake—misjudging human nature and basing a government system on that misjudgment.

I believe the very heart and soul of conservatism is libertarianism.

Reagan was wrong. Libertarianism is simply "liberty for me, but not for thee." The core values of conservatism are:

Sacredness. What the secular philosopher John Rawls calls the "separateness of persons" in response to utilitarianism. Human rights cannot be traded off against each other. Conservatism can explain why: that's because a human life is sacred. See also: Genesis 9:6.
Children and the unborn. Whereas libertarianism creates a sphere of moral consciousness that encomposses consenting adults, conservatism extends it to all human beings (i.e. members of the species Homo sapiens). That includes children and the unborn.
Personal responsibility. Libertarianism does encompass this.
Duty to the poor. Conservatism does acknowledge moral duties to help the poor, unlike the egoistic libertarianism. However, that is contingent on (#3). A hand up, not a hand out.

This was an interview Reagan gave to the libertarian rag, Reason Magazine. It came just prior to Reagan's run for the GOP nomination in 1976. Reagan was politicking for votes. Nothing more. Reagan was no libertarian.

Reagan went onto to say:

"Now, I can’t say that I will agree with all the things that the present group who call themselves Libertarians in the sense of a party say, because I think that like in any political movement there are shades, and there are libertarians who are almost over at the point of wanting no government at all or anarchy. "

"But again, I stand on my statement that I think that libertarianism and conservatism are traveling the same path."

Other than a desire for fiscal responsibility in government, over the last 33 years, libertarianism hasn't traveled the same path as conservatism.