Reihan reviews Geoffrey Kabaservice's Rule and Ruin: The Downfall of Moderation and the Destruction of the Republican Party, From Eisenhower to the Tea Party. Money quote:
Kabaservice is searingly critical of the conservative movement that eventually triumphed within the GOP. His chief complaint is the distance between what conservatives have said and how they have governed. In a particularly vivid passage lamenting the failures of George W. Bush’s presidency, he writes that “a Republican Party without moderates was like a heavily muscled body without a head.” After Bush’s 2004 reelection,Republicans held majorities in the House and the Senate for the fifth straight election, but, Kabaservice observes, “conservatives proved unable to achieve their goals, largely because they lacked the ideas the moderates had once provided and the skill at reaching compromise with the opposition at which moderates had excelled.” The irony of the decline of the moderates is that it made the achievement of conservative goals all but impossible.
The Dish 