I think that an excess of unity gripped the party after winning an election based on the weak foundation of being “not Clinton” (or his heir). The internal dialog should have been starting no later than 2002 for the party to remain strong after it had regained governing majorities.

The best hope for the GOP right now is two-fold, disunity within the ranks and complacency within the Democratic party.

You can go back to the drafting of the Constitution itself for an example.

Unity within a party does provide for better strategy and organization toward a goal, but the very definition of the party in flux and redefinition may rely solely on disunity to promote the necessary change.

Democrats are enjoying electoral success now not because of a growing love for “big government” in the country, but because they spent several years in the woods in disarray and faced with a gigantic unity problem. It wasn’t resolved by dissolving the lack of unity, it was resolved by that very “in-fighting” weeding out some of the most ineffective machines of the political party.

There is as much a strategic “on the ground” perpetual motion to a party as there is a solidifying of unity for a platform or ideology. There are “machines” at play, as well as ideals. And those machines are rarely fine tuned or sharpened in effectiveness by unity. In fact, one could also argue the unity — at least in action and policy — of the GOP during Bush’s administration was the very factor that led to a certain complacency that took the party down.

Unity isn’t a bad thing, but it’s rarely enough to win elections unless it’s reached by a certain amount of fine tuning that a lack of unity can foster quickly.