"A Politics Based on Realities, not Phantoms"

"A quarter century ago, Ronald Reagan and Walter Mondale offered Americans substantial policy alternatives. In 2010, by contrast, we see the parties hammering each other over differences barely more perceptible than those of 1880. Republicans rage against the Democrats’ bailouts, takeovers, deficits—yet all three commenced under George W. Bush, not Barack Obama. Almost every concept in Obama’s intensely controversial health plan has at one point or another been advanced by a senior Republican, from Bob Dole to Mitt Romney. I type these words having just watched Fox News’s Glenn Beck liken President Obama’s call for voluntary national service to something out of Maoist China. Obama’s service program barely differs in form, content, and rhetoric from Bush’s program, which in turn was almost identical to the program created by the elder President Bush in 1989.
"Reading a speech like Ingersoll’s—or listening to today’s talk radio—you almost wonder whether strident rhetoric, then as now, functions more as a substitute for policy differences than as their expression."

David Frum in The Atlantic argues that Republicans today should emulate the Mugwumps of the 1880s.