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43 was born in Connecticut and spent his entire adult life in Texas, which has 34 electoral votes. Texas has become a safe Republican state, if the party can temper its recent anti-Hispanic stance, but remains the nation's second most populous.

True.

You start by awarding Corporal Dunham the Medal of Honor, as President Bush will on Thursday. You support Mr. Dunahm's mom emotionallly, as Kevin Miller's mom has. You dedicate your life to making Corporal Dunham's sacrifice meaningful, as Kelly Miller and Bill Hampton have tried to do. And you honor all of our service members and their families as most Americans do. For non-subscribers, the article describes Kelly Miller's drunk driving accident, which injured his girl friend -- and his unit's support, from the battalion commander to his fellow grunts. It's not easy for a 23-year-old to live with the inowledge that a buddy sacrified his life for yours.

Nominating a Kansan is a sure prescription for defeat (to wit, Bob Dole and Alf Landon). We're going to win Kansas' whopping 6 electoral votes unless the Democrats carry 45+ states. Why not nominate someone who can add blue sstates, rather than subtract red ones?

If conseervative Republicans hold to their declaration not to support a Giuliani or Romney if nominated, we're looking at a 40-45 state Democrat blow-out in 2008. Bush won two nail-biters in 2000 & 2004. The party won't continue to win if it permanently writes off the entire Northeast and Pacific Coast, and most of the Midwest. Most of these now solidly blue states were once solidly Republican.

2008 will not be a banner year for Republicans or Republican candidates. Giuliani has been married three times including a cousin, McCain has staked out a position to the right of Bush on Iraq and Romney is a member of LDS, a denomination I respect but which is viewed by many voters as a cult. Additionally, unless the Republican nominee distances himself or herself from Bush, he or she will campaign bearing the Iraq albatross. If support for Iraq is 35% now, it's likely to drop to a record low in polling history by 2008.

In such a case, I think nominating Condi Rice would be a creative way to trump a probable Roddham candidacy, but she has declared she won't run. Alternatively, Rudy's the best of a bad lot. If the race is competitive, potentially he could pick off toss-up blue states such as New Hampshire, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota and hold Ohio, Iowa and New Mexico. Rudy is credible on national security and crime because of 9-11 and his days as a prosecutor. He's pro-business. The party won't win with another Sunbelt WASP male instructing voters how to conduct their lives. There will be red state defections this time. The party ought to focus on keeping Congerssional party strength close, so it can recapture the House and Senate in 2010 or 2014.

Republicans can push a social agenda on the shelf observing Democrats make policy for the next generation or unite to emphasize the issues that attract, rather than repel the broad mass of Republicans, independents, and conservative Democrats.

After a defeat, the tendency of both parties is to redouble their efforts to push an unpopular social agenda on the electorate. The Republicans did it in 1964 and the Democrats did it in 1984. That's when you wind up with 140 Representatives in a 435-member House and 33 Senators in a 100-member chamber, as the Republicans had in the 89th Congress.

Ideological purity is tempting and much easier than building a majority with people with whom one may disagree on many issues.

My beliefs exactly.

I cut Dubya slack because he was my guy. Let's be frank. He won the support of Congress, the American people and me for the invasion of Iraq because he told us Saddam was close to possessing nuclear weapons, that he had massive chemical and biological stocks in any event and that removing him was preferable to the status quo. And I believed him on trust. When there was no nuclear program and niminal chemical and biological stockpiles, he rolled out the democracy justification. Like a lot of Americans, I continued to support him because the press reported he believed he could withdraw U.S. troops quickly. Unfortunately, Dubya wasn't succesful. The American people will venerate a Lexington, an Alamo, a Bataan. What they won't support is a steady diet of not winning. As I've repeated ad nauseum is that Iraq is not a nation-state: The Shiite and Jurdish majority want no part of an Iraqi state. Even though our troops have performed brilliantly, the people don't want what we're trying to peddle. A democratic Kurdistan? Perhaps. A democratic Shiite south? No. As we both know, Islam is both a political and religious movement. The essence is submission to Allah. The Koran and Haddith leave no place for democracy. Where do we go from here? Getting out of the Sunni triangle and Shiite south leaving as favorable a situation elsewhere as possible. Give the government a deadline, switch to a training mission, try to broker the partition of the country and to share oil revenues, and withdraw to Iraqi Kurdistan and Kuwait. Get Iraq behind us and focus on the strategies that are working -- building opposition to the terrorists, cutting off their financial support, killing their leaders and technical support network, and training people who will oppose them. The recent Ethiopian invasion of Somalia is a perfect example.

I agree.

I agree. Let's stick to issues on which we agree that are important to voters: limiting taxes and defending the nation. Let's soft-peddle social issues in 2008, because they are losers.

Basically, I agree. The Senate did support earmarks and the Iraq boondoggle, both of which proved to be toxic. Frist's non-leadership didn't help. Voters in the handful of competitive states and districts were in a throw-the-bums-out mood.

I agree with you regarding amnesty. It's a repudiation that we are a nation of laws. And I support your right to present this position to your elected representatives.

For me, our electoral loss is an open wound. I'm concerned about our ability to hold the White House in 2008. While you certainly did not do it, I'm opposed to making support for amnesty a litus test. I want a candidate who will reduce taxes and support the War of Terrorism, the Get-Osama strain rather than the Stay-Bogged-Down-in_Iraq strain and who can win. With support for Republicans hovering around 30%, divisive social issues will have to remain in the background.

What we should be asking ourselves is who can win 270 electoral votes on November 4, 2008? In the popular mind, Republicans are exclusively a White Anglo-Saxon Southern Evangelical Protestant male party. That's wonderful, but it's only 10% of the electorate. Rudy may not be the world's best Catholic, but he is a Catholic, a voter bloc Ronald Reagan (a lapsed Irish Catholic) carried, but 41, Dole, and 43 did not. Also, he's not British, which is a positive electorally. Certainly, it's easier to imagine a Hispanic or a woman voting for a guy named Rudy Giuliani than a guy named Duncan Hunter, for example. In particular, single women don't like WASP candidates because their boss is probably named Duncan Hunter. They've got a boss lording it over them from 8-5, and then they listen to George Walker Bush lording it over them during prime time. We got our clock cleaned with Dennis Hastert at the helm. Why not try an ethnic?

I don't know squat about Romney, except that we won two landslides in the second most Democrat state in the nation and he is a refreshing change stylistically from Bush.

The election returns. We lost six seats.

I like Tommy Franks, but Tommy isn't running. Realistically, the nominee is going to be McCain or Giuliani, with Romney a dark horse. The reason is a successful candidate is going to have to raise $50MM by New Hampshire and $250-500MM by November (depending on how competitive the race is). If a candidate can't raise the money, he doesn't have a chance.

Maybe the party should consider why it didn't carry a single Northeastern or West Coast state in 2004, regions which were once reliably Republican. Perhaps we should listen to voters for a change, rather than try to impose our social agenda on them. Whatever their faults, people like Schwarzenegger, Romney and Guiliani managed to win in strongly Democrat electorates. Maybe we could learn someting from them. Clearly, if we repeat our 2006 performance, the 2008 election will be a Democrat sweep.

How many states are you willing to write off? If we lose Ohio, as we did in '06, we're gonna lose.

If Guiliani could goose the Catholic vote from the high 40s to the low 50s, states such as Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin and Minnesota would be in reach.

If so, let's run on taxes and getting Osama, not divisive social issues.

I agree that employers and illegal immigrants should obey the law, but is the issue we want to stand on in 2008? Through Prop 187, Pete Wilson turned California from a reliably Republican state since its admission to the Union in 1850 to a certain 55 electoral votes for the Democrats. Bush won the 2004 Presidential election in part because he polled 44% of the Hispanic vote. If he had polled Dole's abysmal 21% (in 1996), he would have lost.

Republicans have just had their clocks cleaned at the polls. Basically, we can run on social issues which divide us and lose, or we can run on the economic and national security issues that unite us, and have a reasonable chance to win.

After every election loss, the tendency is for idealogues to take over the party, transforming a single loss into a generation out of power. I don't want Hillary Clinton or Nancy Pelosi to set the nation's agenda. I want to win. As a party, we've written off women, Catholics, African-Americans, Jews, and Muslims. If we allow Democrats to poll 80% of the Hispanic vote, we'll go the way of the Federalists and Whigs.




We need legal immigration, quite simply because the American-born population is not replacing itself. If Congress is unwilling to create a guest worker program, we're going to have illegal immigration program -- if the U.S. economy remains strong.