This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Wednesday, October 14th, 2009.

I'm Caleb Brown.

With a democratic precedent intent on centralizing more power in Washington, will the GOP simply coast or actually

fight to limit government?

John Samples, director of the Cato Institute's Center for Representative Government, comments on the elections of 2010.

Given the response to attempts at health care reform, town hall meetings, tea parties, and the unpopularity of this Democratic

controlled Congress, what are possible GOP strategies going forward?

Well, I think the first thing the GOP is going to be thinking about is just doing nothing

and continuing to let time pass so that they can pull themselves up off the floor. What I do see in private

conversations and so on though is a willingness to admit that there were a lot of mistakes

made during the Bush administration, that the divergence

from a more traditional limited government rhetoric at least on the GOP side at the behest of President Bush

was a political mistake. It's hard to deny that given the results of 2006 and 2008. So that's sort of sifting through and the

willingness to begin looking for targets of opportunity. It's but I do still feel it's a party that is maybe has turned a corner or maybe more appropriately

bounced up off the bottom, but not one that has yet fully got the bit in its teeth and is ready

to run back toward assuming power and finding out what exactly it's about its messages in this environment.

More than anything else, like the Democrats in 2006, I think they don't have a lot to do

through Congress and they just simply want to let the Democrats do bad things to themselves.

Now you said that that was the strategy essentially of Democrats in 05 and 06 was to let

the Republicans continue their meltdown.

What hope is there then that a Republican revolution would mirror that of 1994, at least in terms of ideas that they attempt to connect with people that are

free market, more libertarian in nature that they actually put out there.

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