The Republican Party often seems to have no real guiding principles at all, while the Democrats obviously do have them. Only trouble is, the Democrats' principles are the wrong ones, the principles of the Left. A lot of people can see that, and they won't go for it. Besides the fact that anti Americanism is not so popular in the actual USA as the Dems seem to imagine. So I'm guardedly hopeful that Hanson is right on this.
What is surprising is that elections ARE so close.
One of my favorite authors Arnold Kling of TCSDaily had an essay recently called Are You a Conservative? (http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1649142/posts) where he argues that many liberals do live their lives by what now is considered to be conservative standards, they just vote Democrat because of a habit, or idealistic utopian ideals of how they imagine things should have been.
I disagree
I think the democrats problems come from the fact that they are not unified
they are actually several differnet groups cobbled together
some are tree huggers, some are pro abortion, some are pro gay marriage and some are anti war
that is why kerry was such a flip flopper and no democrat can ever give a straight answer they always have to go through this huge mathematical equation to figure out what to say to piss off they fewest memebers of their patchwork base...