The party of ideas.

Ed Kilgore puts his finger on why Republicans can't propose new ideas.

Unfortunately, when you start trying to come up with “new ideas” on a broad array of issues, it tends to bring you directly into conflict with ideological shibboleths, the most important being the conservative conviction that government can’t do much of anything competently other than blowing things up and rewarding the already rewarded. Coming up with an actual way of “replacing Obamacare” that doesn’t exacerbate the worst features of the pre-reform status quo ante (e.g., the favorite Republican prescription of interstate insurance sales) isn’t a day’s work but that of years spent trying to overcome or subvert the conservative hostility to any real public sector role in health care, and to the very risk-spreading idea of health insurance itself.  

I’m skeptical that a room full of Jack Kemps could come up with a whole lot that would meet any serious public policy smell test while passing the various litmus tests of the conservative movement that National Review (which Lowry edits) helped launch back in the day. But I suppose you gotta start somewhere, unless you want to forget about the steak and keep issuing reports about how to jazz up the sizzle.

Yeah, the GOP has spent the past four decades screaming that government is the problem. Coming up with an affirmative agenda negates that.