First, it has never been a problem about having great ideas, but of being saddled with the worst party communications shop in all of modern times, an infrastructure that does not know how to transmit those ideas. To be a “leader” of the GOP one should be making frequent extended appearances on the shows of talk radio’s “Big 12” — Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Mark Levin, Laura Ingraham, Glenn Beck, Bill Bennett, Mike Gallagher, Dennis Prager, Michael Medved, Dennis Miller, Larry O’Connor and yours truly — in order to push out these ideas and demand for them attention and broader hearings.

Instead the House GOP leadership works overtime to avoid communicating with the party’s base throughout talk radio — Speaker John Boehner, soon-to-depart Majority Leader Eric Cantor and Cantor’s replacement, Kevin McCarthy — simply refuse to do the job of cheerleader for the cadre of brilliant thinkers led by Yuval Levin that Tanenhaus identified. Until the “leadership” embraces and extolls their work, they will toil on largely unknown and unnoticed. It was Jack Kemp who made Arthur Laffer a force, but no one in the Congress works much at doing that for Yuval Levin or any of the other big brains.