After the Bush Muddle

What most Republicans want to do is reboot their party's politics.

BY DANIEL HENNINGER
Wall Street Journal

When Mitt Romney, John McCain, Rudy Giuliani, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton were hauling their ambition around the country a month or so ago--the primaries a year off and the general election nearly two years--their march to the horizon looked to me like a parody of serious politics. I was wrong. It's too short.

It would take a lifetime to figure out who these guys really are, and longer than that to decode Hillary Clinton. Yet come January 2009, one will run the nation. Time's running out.

Fred Thompson's boom-voiced boomlet is said to reflect Republican dissatisfaction with the announced candidates. What that dissatisfaction consists of is hard to say. Given there were 10 men onstage in last week's debate in the haunted house of the Reagan Library--nearly all experienced and serious Republican politicians--that's a pretty high level of dissatisfaction. What do GOP voters want?

What they want, I suspect, is not so much Mr. Right as a clearer understanding than they've got now of what it means to be a Republican.