DAVID FRUM ON THE VANISHING REPUBLICAN VOTER: Well, Frum looks at economics, but I think it’s a mistake to underestimate the role of broken promises: they ran as a small-government party of reform, and they — at least the GOP delegation in Congress — then acted as if they were trying to stuff their pockets as fast as they could, basically because they were trying to stuff their pockets as fast as they could. Dissatisfaction is a natural result. (That said, I eagerly await Mickey Kaus’s comments on what Frum says about immigration and middle-class wages.)

And it puts the country in a bad place. My ideal — at least in terms of potentially attainable scenarios –would probably be a centrist Democrat as President and a small-government Republican majority in Congress. The GOP delegation’s miserable behavior over the past decade or so has made that impossible, at least in the foreseeable future. A centrist Republican President and a center-leftish Democratic Congress looks like the closest we can come, and I suspect it will be considerably less useful in a small-government sense.