For years now, George W. Bush has been portrayed as the ultimate far-right conservative. Bush, his critics said, was the true right-winger who wanted to ‘reshape’ the country, based on traditional conservative principles.

Ross Douthat, however, remembers everyone that Bush was in fact the ‘reform Republican’ so many Republicans say is needed today. Bush was a ‘compassionate’ conservatism who did not want to make government smaller but “stronger.” He wanted to “reform Washington,” not the nation. He would accept that the federal government played an important role in education and health care, and would work to let it do its job better, possibly by increasing its size.

And then, eight years later, Bush’s kind of conservatism has universally been declared a failure. It has dealt with some, but certainly not all problems or even most. The U.S. deficit has increased, the U.S. is engaged in a war in a country far, far away, and voters are likely to help Democrats win in a landslide Tuesday. All, for a large part, due to Bush.

Douthat goes on to say that he keeps track of the debate among conservatives about the future (direction) of their movement, but explains that he is not as involved in it as he ought to be, simply because he lacks passion.

I think the deeper reason for my political gloom has to do with something that Jonah Goldberg raised in our bloggingheads chat about conservatism – namely, the sense that the era now passing represented a great opportunity to put into practice the sort of center-right politics that I’d like to see from the Republican Party, and that by failing the way it did the Bush Administration may have cut the ground out from under my own ideas before I’d even figured out exactly what they were.  As I said to Jonah. I have all sorts of disagreements with the specific ways President Bush attempted to renovate the GOP, on the level of policy and philosophy alike. But the fact remains that the renovation Bush attempted wasan effort to respond to some of the political, social and economc trends that Reihan and I discuss in Grand New Party – and those of us who want a reformed conservatism have to recognize Bush’s attempt, and reckon with his failure.

This is by no means a new insight, but it’s one that’s been brought home to me by the looming end of the Bush Era and the struggles of the McCain campaign. Conservatism in the United States faces a series of extremely knotty problems at the moment. How do you restrain the welfare state at a time when the entitlements we have are broadly popular, and yet their design puts them on a glide path to insolvency? How do you respond to the socioeconomic trends – wage stagnation, social immobility, rising health care costs, family breakdown, and so forth – that are slowly undermining support for the Reaganite model of low-tax capitalism? How do you sell socially-conservative ideas to a moderate middle that often perceives social conservatism as intolerant? How do you transform an increasingly white party with a history of benefiting from racially-charged issues into a party that can win majorities in an increasingly multiracial America?  etc.

Watching the McCain campaign, you’d barely even know that these problems exist, let alone that conservatives have any idea what to do about them. But there were people in the Bush Administration who did understand the situation facing the Right, and set out to wrestle with these challenges – and as a result, George W. Bush had a real chance (especially given the political capital he enjoyed after 9/11) to establish a model for center-right governance in the post-Reagan era. That he failed is by no means the greatest tragedy of the last eight years, but it is a tragedy nonetheless – for conservatives, and for the country.

I’m not counseling despair here: There were people in 1976 who thought Richard Nixon had irrevocably squandered the chance to build a new right-of-center majority, and looked how that turned out. But for now, as America goes to the polls, I find myself stuck thinking about the lost opportunities of the last eight years, and the possibility that they may not come round again.

Douthat’s words are logical and they will sound familiar to many conservative bloggers and pundits. Patrick Ruffini, Jon Henke, John Hawkins and others still seem to be passionate about conservatism and politics, but many others are not. Even I, an outsider, am tired of the political debate which never seems to go anywhere.

But – what Douthat forgets to keep in mind, I think, is that the real reason for his boredom is the length of the presidential campaign. You see many bloggers and pundits live up now, precisely because the elections are just one day off. After tomorrow, we all know that it is over, that a new president will take office, at which time we can analyze more, report ‘normal’ news, and debate the issues. So, suddenly you see many become more passionate; we’re not passionate about tomorrow’s election, we’re passionate about the fact that the election signals the end of this draining campaign.

After the election it will be business as usual. Democrats will rule. They will pursue many policies, both domestic and foreign, (moderate) conservatives agree with (to a degree), and far more they do not agree with. They will then start talking about the issues again, articulating alternatives views and plans. The political debate will focus on issues and on ‘issue-related’ news.

We will all be passionate again, fairly soon even I predict.