It will tap into the escalating frustration many Americans feel about many other issues: the $862 billion stimulus bill, budgets that could triple the national debt in a decade, bureaucrats with authority to set the pay of executives at major corporations, a president embarrassed by the notion of American exceptionalism, an antiterrorism strategy that grants Miranda rights to terrorists and redistributionist tax increases that penalize our most entrepreneurial citizens.

Center-right candidates must appreciate that something unusual is going on out there, and they need to understand its source. Voters’ frustrations stem from a growing sense that their children and grandchildren will inherit an America in decline, a dramatic departure from our historic faith in intergenerational upward mobility…

Center-right candidates will be positioned to tattoo incumbents with their support for the most controversial elements of the president’s agenda — the economic stimulus bill, the 2010 budget resolution, cap and trade and health care reform — and should explain how and why these votes traduce the core values that most Americans hold dear.