Probably nothing could have won the 2008 election for John McCain (though of course in the opinion of some ex-Bush officials that tells us nothing, nothing! about the state of the lightbulb). But what Senator McCain needed to do in 2008, the Republican nominee must also do in 2016. The nominee needs to explain how voting Republican will reduce the risk of war and of terror attacks. The message can (and should) be peace through strength as opposed to peace through retreat and appeasement, but absent the equivalent of another Pearl Harbor or 9/11 event, peace is and must be the goal of someone who wants to be elected President of the United States. “L’Eléphant c’est la paix.”

Five years after the end of the Bush administration, many of the pundits and public intellectuals of the Republican security world have not yet found a new vocabulary and a new set of ideas about our changing world that a new presidential candidate could use to reach out to the center without losing the base. Maintaining links of credibility and trust with the party’s base while reaching out to the center with a compelling national vision is something successful presidential candidates must do; if the national security division of the GOP intellectual does its job, rethinking past shibboleths and developing new and compelling ideas and programs, the party’s task becomes easier. If they can’t pull away from loyalty to the past president to focus on the needs of the next one, the task of the GOP’s next presidential nominee will be considerably more difficult.

The Bush administration’s damage to the Republican brand was not, of course, just about foreign policy. Presiding over the biggest economic crisis since the Great Depression has a little something to do with the party’s poor standing. Herbert Hoover loyalists argued for decades that the Depression was not Hoover’s fault and economic historians may agree; practical politicians, however, must deal with the perceptions that exist.

Any effort to reach the youth vote, to reverse the collapse of African American and Hispanic support between 2004 and 2012 and any outreach to suburban moms and other key blocs of swing voters will be hampered until and unless the GOP can persuade voters to put the Bush administration firmly in the rear-view mirror.