I'm increasingly confused by what conservatives mean when they talk about reforming the Republican Party. For awhile, I figured they wanted a transformation in what the Republican Party believed. But increasingly I'm starting to believe that they want a transformation in who believes what the Republican Party believes, David Brooks' column today is a good example: Palin and McCain are reformers, but with no bill of grievances. Their agenda as reformers appears to have been getting the party to nominate them rather than other people. I admit that, for Palin and McCain, that probably is change you can believe in. But it's not clear how it changes the Republican Party. Indeed, as far as I can tell, the story of the Republican primaries was that McCain agreed to leverage his credibility as an independent thinker in exchange for the nomination. Thus, the party got someone with a reformist image who promised to adopt the party's agenda wholesale and leave its traditional power centers untouched. What got reformed, as far as I can tell, was the reformer. But for a lot of the folks who seemed to be clamoring for a deeper restructuring, that seems to have been enough.
