Remember all that talk a year ago about how the GOP was in big trouble and could be doomed to a permanent minority?  Well, all of that went away with Scott Brown’s win in January.  Now, everyone thinks 2010 will be a good year for the Republicans.  While that’s all well and good in the short term, things might not be so good in the long term.

In what seems to be a long running series on the Tea Party movement here at RU, blogger Jazz Shaw of the Moderate Voice shares his latest encounter with the movement. Here’s a sample:

Early on, I was also taken in by a lot of the media hype and found many of my preconceived notions being challenged. I’ve been spending my time this year working on a Congressional campaign which keeps me on the road quite a bit with my candidate, hitting all of the usual stops as well as some ventures into unknown territory. Many of these events are the same old song and dance. I don’t wish to put too cynical of a face on things, but there are plenty of groups out there where you know in advance which points you need to hit. The pro-life groups want to know you’ve checked the right box on your application. Gun owners and sportsmen clubs need to see that you’re up to date on the Heller decision. But when we started receiving invitations to address some tea party meetings I got nervous.

My immediate reaction was to insist that we didn’t send out any invitations to the press. I’d seen all of the provocative video clips from MSNBC and CNN, along with the blaring headlines at Huffington Post. My mind filled with images of pitchfork wielding townsmen carrying around signs with nooses, swastikas and allegations of secret communist plots. “Good Lord!” I thought. “This election is going to be hard enough. The last thing I need is a picture showing up in our local paper of my candidate hanging around with a bunch of Klansmen.”

I’ve now met with more than a dozen groups in both Upstate New York and Pennsylvania, and my suspicions have been almost unanimously confounded rather than confirmed. We’ve been greeted by surprisingly large groups of citizens who were polite and obviously very well informed on the issues of the day which concern them. The tone has been far more energized and excited than hysterical. And any expectations of a friendly, conservative base reception were quickly dismissed. They asked questions – very tough questions in many cases – and listened patiently to the answers.

It’s another reminder that the Tea Party movement is a lot harder to pigeonhole than people think.

Neoconservatism has been trashed by folks on the left and the right as of late, and for good reason. Many blame neoconservatives for getting us into Iraq.

But Eric Cohen’s essay on Irving Kristol reminds us that neoconservatism had a noble beginning and might have a useful future in the GOP.

Yeah, this is a good reason to be conservative.  Good grief.

Per William Golden’s post, Politico reports how the Tea Party isn’t really shaking up the political establishment.

Richard Ivory takes the GOP to task for avoiding race.

Per James’ post, Raynard Jackson shares his criticism of the Tea Party movement from a conservative perspsective

Ross Douthat’s weekly column is about my favorite governor, Mitch Daniels. Here’s a taste:

In a just world, Daniels’s record would make him the Tea Party movement’s favorite politician. During the fat years of the mid-2000s, while most governors went on spending sprees, he was trimming Indiana’s payroll, slowing the state government’s growth, and turning a $800 million deficit into a consistent surplus. Now that times are hard, his fiscal rigor is paying off: the state’s projected budget shortfall for 2011, as a percentage of the budget, is the third-lowest in the country.

But Daniels hasn’t just been a Dr. No on policy. His “Healthy Indiana” plan, which offers catastrophic coverage to low-income residents, aspires to eventually cover 130,000 people, about a third of the state’s long-term uninsured. He’s pushed targeted investments in kindergarten programs, the police force and the child welfare office. And he’s been a pragmatic free-marketeer, rather than a strict ideologue. His controversial decision to lease the Indiana toll road reaped $3.8 billion for the state. But when an attempt to outsource welfare enrollment went awry, Daniels yanked the system back into the public sector.

It wasn’t that long ago that there was talk, again, about the end of Moderate Republicans.  Now with Scott Brown’s win, we are back in fashion, again.

Via Reason Magazine, Jonathan Rauch writes in National Journal about how Nelson Rockefeller and Barry Goldwater had a fight about the direction of the Republican Party and how Alabama Governor George Wallace won the debate. Today’s GOP bears Wallace’s imprimatur, but not because of his racist tendancies:

I am not saying that today’s Republicans are a bunch of Wallace clones. Or that everything Wallace did or said was wrong, or that Republicans should shun all of his themes just because he used them. I am saying three things.

First, with the important exception of race, not one of Wallace’s central themes, from his bristling nationalism and his court-bashing to his anti-intellectualism and his aggressive provincialism, would seem out of place at any major Republican gathering today.

Second, and again leaving race aside, any Republican politician who publicly renounced the Wallace playbook would be finished as a national leader.

Third, by becoming George Wallace’s party, the GOP is abandoning rather than embracing conservatism, and it is thereby mortgaging both its integrity and its political future. Wallaceism was not sufficiently mainstream or coherent to sustain a national party in 1968, and the same is true today.

Read the whole thing.

Nice story about a showdown at CPAC between GOProud and the National Organization for Marriage.

Richard Ivory, the founder of HipHopRepublican.com makes the case for ending “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.” Here’s a snippet:

“Don’t ask Don’t Tell” at its core violates the very principles of liberty itself which are the very concepts our solders fight for every day. Serving openly does not mean flaunting ones sexuality in another’s’ face. What it means, to the contrary, is that all who serve- be they gay or straight- will be held to the same standards of civic and military propriety. If there are policies against public sexual behavior in the military then everyone should be held up to the same standard. Many supporters of “Don’t ask Don’t Tell” wrongly assume that the policy simply refers to a public admission of being homosexual.

This assumption, however, is a misnomer. The truth is that the policy goes much deeper, and creeps into the private lives of thousands of men and women who serve this nation. Unbeknownst to many, while the policy does not explicitly prohibit homosexuals from being in the military it does prohibit “expressions of homosexuality”. Such “expressions” are not reserved for military life on the base but also include off- base activities. It is in its inclusion of all off-base activities that the policy losses all sense of sanity. Clearly, if a person is gay he or she will, at some point, seek companionship and friendship with others like themselves.

Walter Russell Mead shares his perspective on the Tea Parties and American populism in general. Long story short, those of us who are wary of the Tea Parties may not be pleased with the article, but we would be foolish to ignore what Mead says.

The National Journal interviews former Republican Representative and current head of the centrist Republican Main Street Partnership, Tom Davis on moderate Republicans and the Tea Party movement.

The Washington Times has a story on the seeming resurgence of moderate Republicans in this year’s elections.