Peggy Noonan: Perhaps the GOP Must Lose

Peggy Noonan's latest column is especially thought-provoking.

Baseless Confidence
It may take a defeat in November for the GOP to unlearn the lessons of power.

What's behind the president's, and the Congressional Republicans', poll drop? All the bad news that's been noted, from Iraq and Katrina to high spending and immigration. What's behind the bad decisions made in those areas? Detachment
from the ground.

Power is distancing.

When you've been in Congress for a while, or the White House for a while, you both forget too many things and learn too many things.

You forget why they sent you. You forget it's not that you're charming and wonderful. You forget it's not you. You become immersed in a Washington conversation, a political conversation, that is, by definition, unlike the normal human conversation back home. To survive and thrive, national politicians have to speak two languages, Here and Home. Actually it's more than two languages, it's two cultures. It's hard to straddle cultures.

But even as you forget a lot, you learn a lot. You get crammed into your head the political realities on the ground around you--how big the minority Democratic bloc in the House really is, how many votes the other team has in what committee, where to go for legal money, how the press will react to any given decision or statement.

In time you know a lot of things the people who sent you to Washington don't know. And you come to forget what they do know. It used to be easy for you to remember that, because it's what you knew too.

Republicans inside and outside Washington are right when they say Republican leaders take a daily pounding in the press. They do. They're right when they say this causes attrition. It does. They're right when they say history handed the Republicans a unique challenge in 9/11 and after.

But it's also true that the administration and the Congress are losing their base, and it isn't because of the media. Republicans on the ground love to defy the MSM. When the media dislike their guy, they take it as proof their guy is good.

Read her entire take.