The Right has a messaging problem, yes – but it also has a message problem. It could be America’s natural governing party, sure – but as long as its economic agenda looks like Jim DeMint’s alternative stimulus, full stop, nothing else to see here, it won’t be. Republicans are in deep trouble because the economic meltdown was piled on top of George W. Bush’s personal unpopularity – but they would be in some kind of trouble no matter what, because the right-wing message on domestic policy hasn’t been resonating with “the people in the middle culturally and economically,” who Ruffini rightly identifies as the backbone of any plausible conservative majority, for going on years and years now. The current crisis hasn’t created the problem; it’s taken an existing problem and throw it into sharp relief.