Good morning. It's Monday, March 19th. This is the Cato Daily Podcast. I'm Anastasia Yuglova.

Over a year ago at a Cato City seminar in New York, MS NBC's Tucker Carlson gave a speech

sketching the decline and fall of the Republican Party.

At the time Tucker correctly predicted the dissolution of the contract with America in the November

elections.

Now that the 110th Congress has convened, I wanted to follow up on his thoughts on another election,

the one that awaits us in 2008.

Everyone is prepared to offer up a theory as to how the right went wrong, and the latest iteration

of that is Karen Tumalti in the recent

issue of Time magazine in an article titled how the right went wrong.

Would you care to put in your two cents?

The right got power, that's the larger problem.

Specifically, Bush is not an ideologue,

was never a committed conservative on any deep level.

I think some of his instincts are conservative,

maybe even libertarian, some aren't.

Carl Rove and some of the people around him decided early,

and I mean 1998 when he was still governor,

that co-opting conservative organizations,

professional conservatives in Washington and in the States, was key to his victory.

And they did, and they succeeded in doing it.

A lot of conservatives, after spending, you know, low these many years out of power, watching Clinton from the side. of they I think tossed aside their principles in return for the perception that they had

...