Resident Fellow  David Frum

You know the numbers as well as I. From almost the moment George W. Bush returned to office in 2005, a majority of Americans surveyed have said the country was on the "wrong track." (The latest numbers put "wrong track" at over 70 percent.) A majority of Americans express a favorable view of the Democratic party. A majority of Americans express an unfavorable view of the Republican party. On the question "Which party cares more about people like you?" Democrats currently hold a two-to-one lead over the GOP. Ditto on the question "Which party can be described as the party of change?" Two-thirds of Americans disapprove of the job George W. Bush is doing as president.

I could continue, but you get the idea. The Republican party is a very, very threatened organization. And it's important to realize that while Iraq heads the list of Republican troubles, the list extends well beyond Iraq. Standards of living have stagnated under Bush: The median American worker earns no more today than he did in 2001. Health-insurance and energy costs have doubled since 2001.

Corruption gnaws at the image of the GOP. Historically, honesty in government has been a GOP issue: Democrats still pay the price for Tammany Hall. But when asked today which party has more corrupt politicians, Republicans or Democrats, Americans answer "Republicans" by a two-to-one landslide. Likewise, since Jimmy Carter, Republicans have usually been perceived as the more competent party; today, Democrats are seen as better managers by a five-to-three margin.

Democrats go into this election cycle more unified and energized than do the Republicans. In the first quarter of 2007, the three top Democratic candidates for president raised a combined total of $65 million; the three top Republicans, $48 million. The websites of the Democratic presidential candidates attract more traffic than the websites of the Republicans. And then of course comes this deeply demoralizing self-inflicted immigration debacle.

Result: While 60 percent of Democratic primary voters pronounce themselves satisfied with their presidential choices, only 35 percent of Republicans say the same. This unhappiness is the opportunity that is luring Fred Thompson and Newt Gingrich into the race. And that's great: the more the merrier. But there is a risk in this unhappiness. Unhappy parties can succumb to nostalgia for their great leaders of the past. The Democrats lost election after election looking first for the next Franklin Roosevelt, then for the next John F. Kennedy. Republicans in these frustrating days feel the tug of Reagan nostalgia.

We feel: If only we had another Reagan! If only we could find a consistent small-government tax-cutter who is also sincerely and consistently socially conservative! If only we could find a candidate who exudes both strength and good cheer, traditionalism and optimism!

And so we demand from our candidates ever more fervent declarations of fealty to an ideology that interests an ever-dwindling proportion of the public.

It gives me no pleasure to say this, but those hopes are delusions. In every way we can measure, the voting public is moving away from the kind of conservatism we know as Reaganism. Federal income taxes? Americans were furious about them in 1980, and no wonder: Over the previous decade, the tax burden on the ordinary person had doubled. Today, polls show Americans relatively unbothered by income taxes. No surprise: Three decades of tax reform have heaped a majority of the nation's income-tax burden on the top 5 percent of income-earners. In 1996 and 2000, Republican presidential candidates campaigned on big cuts in personal income tax. They lost the popular vote both times.

Big government? President Bush's big-spending No Child Left Behind bill and his prescription-drug benefit may have been poor public policy--but there's no doubt, they were very popular. Without the first, he would never have been elected president; without the second, he might well have lost reelection.

The entrepreneurial spirit of the investor class? A number of polls are beginning to detect a rising resentment of economic inequality. At one point in 2006, an NBC poll found that inequality ranked second only to fuel prices among domestic issues.

Hope for tomorrow? Today's 20-somethings favor Democrats over Republicans by a 12-point margin--the most lopsided generational preference in the history of polling.

The conservatism we know evolved in the 1970s to meet a very specific set of dangers and challenges: inflation, slow growth, energy shortages, unemployment, rising welfare dependency. In every one of those problems, big government was the direct and immediate culprit. Roll back government, and you solved the problem.

Government is implicated in many of today's top domestic concerns as well. You can trace health-care inflation in part to perverse tax incentives that squelch competition. You can trace the rise in income inequality in part to the failure to enforce immigration laws. But the connection between big government and today's most pressing problems is not as close or as pressing as it was 27 years ago. So, unsurprisingly, the anti-big-government message does not mobilize the public the way it once did.

Of course, we can keep repeating our old lines all the same, just the way Tip O'Neill kept exhorting the American middle class to show more gratitude to the New Deal. But politicians who talk that way soon sound old, tired, and cranky. I wish somebody at the recent GOP presidential debate at the Reagan Library had said: "Ronald Reagan was a great leader and a great president because he addressed the problems of his time. But we have very different problems--and we need very different answers. Here are mine."

But if one of the candidates had said that, would Republicans have hearkened? Or would we have said: The path to the nomination will be crossed by the candidate who does the best job of ticking the boxes of a coalition that probably now spans no more than 30 percent of the electorate?

Barring some calamitous mistake by the Democrats (and true, that can never be ruled out from the "war is lost" party), the GOP enters the 2008 election cycle at a serious disadvantage. If we want to win, we have to offer the American voter something fresh and compelling--answers to the problems that bear on Americans today, not the problems that bore on their parents when disco ruled.

Ronald Reagan was elected at a time when every social indicator seemed to be moving in the wrong direction: crime up, abortion up, divorce up, welfare dependency up, test scores down. Since the mid-1990s, America has been riding a wave of good social news. Crime is down, so is abortion, so is divorce, and so is welfare dependency.

Ronald Reagan's optimism refreshed the country because so many Americans had lost hope in their society. Today, Americans do not worry about their society as they did in 1979. They worry about the competence and effectiveness of their government. In 1979, the issue was "Why are Americans so pessimistic about the future?" Today they wonder: "Why can't the American government win wars and defend the border?"

This year, we are going to find that taxes matter less than health care. Crime matters less than energy prices. Immigration matters more than same-sex marriage. Competence matters more than charisma. It will be a very different environment from the environment in which Republicans prospered in the 1980s. Can we adapt? My friend Michael Ledeen often quotes a line of Machiavelli's: "For this is the tragedy of man--circumstances change, but he does not." Let us act this year to ensure that this observation does not also describe the tragedy of the Republican party in the next.

David Frum is a resident fellow at AEI.