In one corner, there are a large number of bright, mostly younger, self-styled reformers with a diverse — and often contradictory — set of proposals to win back middle-class voters and restore the GOP’s status as “the party of ideas” (as the late Daniel Patrick Moynihan put it).

In another corner are self-proclaimed traditional conservatives and Reaganites, led most notably by Rush Limbaugh, who believe that the party desperately needs to get back to the basics: limited government, low taxes and strong defense.

What is fascinating is that both camps seem implicitly to agree that the real challenge lurks in how to account for the Bush years. For the young Turks and their older allies — my National Review colleagues Ramesh Ponnuru, Yuval Levin and David Frum, the Atlantic’s Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam, New York Times columnist David Brooks et al — the problem is that Bush botched the GOP’s shot at real reform. For the Limbaugh crowd, the issue seems to be that we’ve already tried this reform stuff — from both Bush and McCain — and look where it’s gotten us.