Expertinent is a regular Stumper column featuring interviews with experts on the news of the day. 

It's not a particularly "grand" time to be a Republican. About 70 percent of Americans disapprove of President George W. Bush's performance. Party identification is at an all-time low. Experts expect the GOP to lose between four and seven seats in the Senate and 10 and 20 seats in the House--giving the Democrats their largest majorities in a generation. And John McCain hasn't led Barack Obama in a single poll since May 3.

Enter Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam. Named by David Brooks of the New York Times as "two of the most promising" of "an emerging "group of young and unpredictable rightward-leaning writers," they're editors at the Atlantic Monthly and co-authors of "Grand New Party: How Republicans Can Win the Working Class and Save the American Dream," released earlier this week. The book--which Brooks calls "the best single roadmap of where the party should and is likely to head"--claims that Republicans can save themselves only by ditching the country club for Sam's Club and emphasizing policies that link economic security to family values. Will it work? Who knows. But at this point, anything is worth a try. Douthat and Salam spoke with Stumper this morning. Excerpts:

So, the Grand Old Party: what went wrong?
DOUTHAT: The broad argument in our book is that the GOP is, in many ways, a victim of its own success. The first half book is basically a history of how the Republican Party won working-class voters, who used to form the heart of the Roosevelt coalition. And we argue, I think fairly uncontroversially, that they won them on a series of issues--welfare, crime, taxes and the Cold War--that don't have nearly the salience today that they had when the Republican Party was coming together under Ronald Reagan. Welfare has been reformed fairly successfully. Crime rates have fallen dramatically. Marginal tax rates are considerably lower than they were in the late 1970s. And obviously the Soviet Union has ceased to exist. So the GOP is sort of at a crossroads where, particularly on domestic policy, its agenda doesn't map onto the concerns of working-class Americans the way it did in the '70s, the '80s and '90s.

People lay blame at the feet of President Bush. Obviously the historical backdrop has changed over time, but how much do the mistakes of the past eight years contribute to the current collapse of the GOP?
SALAM: There have been plenty of other books that have offered a litany of what went wrong with the Bush Administration. We don't disagree. But it's certainly true that 2000 presented Republicans with a rare opportunity. When you look at the rhetorical shifts that George W. Bush made in his campaign, it seemed like the public and certainly the conservative public was receptive to a broad shift in political orientation toward a domestic, reformist agenda. When you look at a lot of the policies that John McCain was pointing to, you saw a willingness to break with some conservative orthodoxy. But no one really seized that mantle, in part because 9-11 presented such an attractive opportunity to go back to the kind of rock-ribbed conservative fundamentals of the Reagan era--namely, national security, this time under the guise of terrorism rather than communism. There was an ability to draw on the classic tropes that this generation of conservative politicians was very familiar with. But I think there could've large-scale Republican realignment had they married that national-security politics to more meat on the bone domestically.

How can Republicans reclaim their majority and find their voice going forward?
DOUTHAT: We think they should create a pro-family party that doesn't abandon the party's commitment to social conservatism. The GOP should remain--and has to remain--a pro-life party. But a lot of the challenges faced by working-class Americans in the modern economy actually flow from issues of family breakdown. It's interesting. If you look at the marriage rates in the 1950s and 1960s across social classes, the upper-middle class, the working class and the poor all got married and divorced at about the same rate. The all had children in wedlock or out of wedlock at about the same rate. That's changed dramatically over the past 50 years. So upper-middle-class Americans are still behaving like bourgeois, 1950s surburbanites. They're getting married, they have low divorce rates, they're very unlike to have children out of wedlock. That's not true for the working class. What you see in the white working class, in fact, is a trajectory that parallels, in alarming ways, what the black working class went through in terms of collapsing marriage rates and out-of-wedlock birth rates in the 1960s and 1970s. So we argue that that's one of the biggest challenges facing the American working class, and it's at the root of a lot of the inequality and a lot of the economic anxiety that are big factors in this election year.

That's interesting. Most people typically think that poverty causes the breakdown of the family, but if I'm reading you correctly, you're saying the reverse.
DOUTHAT: It's not necessarily the reverse, but rather that you can't separate one from the other. It's a cyclical effect. Poverty creates stress that leads to family breakdown, and family breakdown creates stress that leads to poverty. If you look at, for instance, divorce rates in the United States and how divorce interacts with poverty in terms of splitting up incomes...

SALAM: ... It's very straightforward. When you have a young kid, the sort of supervision that raising a kid or more than one kid takes, it certainly helps to have more than one person. That's very basic and very familiar. But if we're talking about people who are going up the economic ladder, it's interesting because what family breakdown does is it makes mobility harder. Let's say you want to finish college. It becomes much, much harder to do that when you don't have another adult in the household. Unless you have those very thick networks that upper-middle-class people take for granted, you're going to have to go into the paid market for child care. Even renting an apartment. All of these workers who are going to Cape Cod, they actually have to rent rooms in hotels because they don't have the savings that they need in order to put a downpayment or make a deposit on an apartment that they rent for the summer. That's something that really exacerbates the cycle of poverty. And when you don't have family breakdown--when you have two parties who can contribute--then you see a very different picture.

DOUTHAT: The GOP is well-positioned to address a lot of these concerns, but it needs to broaden what it means to be a pro-family party.

SALAM: We're not trying to find victims, and we're not trying to point fingers. It's just that policy-makers are paying attention to these interactions across different silos. When you look at the New Deal, they actually had a pretty keen sense of how culture shapes economics and how economics shapes culture. There's this desire to silo these things off. That's Thomas Frank's "What's the Matter with Kansas" argument: "Oh, these are issues that are just designed to distract you from your real economic interests. Who really cares about marriage? Who really cares about abortion? Who really cares about family values?" And one of the core arguments of this book is, wait a second--actually, those cultural aspects of your life in fact relate to your economic well-being. It's the idea of a conservative politics that is culturally egalitarian and that recognizes government can play a role to help people on the first rungs of the economic ladder.

In your view, how do Democrats typically get this wrong? As a party, they typically seem more in tune, rhetorically at least, with the needs of the working class.
SALAM: Democrats are very reluctant to be judgmental about family structure. They are very uncomfortable saying there's an ideal family structure and that's what we should enshrine in our policies. A big part of what any president can do is occupy the bully pulpit and give a sense of the moral direction of our government and our society. Sure,  that's not enough. But while some Democrats are doing a great job in terms of devising clever policies to aid working families, the problem is that clever policies are only going to take you so far when they're not happening in this broad framework about the value of family values.

But are there really any silver-bullet policies that government can implement to, you know, keep families together?
SALAM: No, not necessarily. But they can reduce some of those burdens and some of that stress. Our whole vision is saying "yes" to a less-regulated economy of free and open labor markets, but also saying "yes" to a government that sees including working class and poor people in the mainstream economy as a high priority. Here's an example: the government should see to it that your catastrophic medical care needs are taken care of. On health care we are actually fairly open to a lot of different possibilities, but the solution we like the most is having a broadly market-oriented system where once you pass a certain spending threshold, the government's going to kick in. For example, if you have a kid a who has cancer, who has a pre-existing condition, there's a recognition that you have to have some kind of social insurance over the entire population. Here's another: minimum wage. Having something like an increased minimum wage is actually going to discourage people from entering the economy. But having something like wage subsidies, where you're telling employers, "Look, we want these low-wage employees to have a living wage, but we're going to give you some amount of money to see to it that these guys are being paid $10 an hour. But you're not bearing the entire cost of that, and you're customers are not bearing the entire cost of that." That seems like a much shrewder strategy. Or even traffic. It seems like a really silly thing, but it actually puts a lot of strain on families when you consider the amount of time that's spent getting from place to place.

DOUTHAT: What we're trying to do in the book is less provide a 10-point plan for Republican domination than provide a pool of ideas that hopefully conservative candidates can draw on, whether in this election cycle or five to 10 years down the road.

Let's shift to the politics of this. In your ideal vision, what would the "Grand New Party" sound like?
DOUTHAT: It would sound in part like the early neoconservatives. Neoconservatism obviously became a dirty word in American politics during the debates over the war in Iraq. But we like the applied neoconservatism of the 1990s. Tommy Thompson's welfare reform in Wisconsin. Or Rudy Giuliani's crime-fighting policies in New York. Or even to a certain extent the "Contract with America," which, if you look back, was actually an incremental effort to make the tax system fairer to the middle and working class full of policies meant to make the welfare state work better. That's sort of the broad model that we're talking about--a politics that's interested in reforming the welfare state as well as shrinking it.

Do any Republicans get this?
SALAM: It's these Midwestern, Catholic governors we had in the 1990s, these guys who were the applied neoconservatives par excellence. These guys are really, really good models for where you'd want the party to be. People who were at the center--who were really socially conservative but who were also very solutions-oriented, very "roll up your shirt sleeves," and who were very plain-spoken. They were able to resonate with voters in the Republican L--in the South, in the Mountain States--but were also able to expand because they connected with suburban voters nationally. That's the kind of figure you'd want to see.

Do any current Republicans speak this language?
SALAM: You saw it in the Huckabee campaign--that's one possible model of someone who's using this very evangelical, populist language. We think there are some dangers with that and some things that are appealing. The fact that he was able to talk frankly about obesity and other ideas that connect with the public was really important, and that's part of being a governor from a border state. The danger was that he appeared to be a very sectarian and regional figure--which only would've reinforced the idea that Republicans, as their gains recede, are becoming a Southern, regional party. In that sense, Sarah Palin is probably even more promising. The fact that she's a mother, and a working mother, is something that really does resonate. Though she isn't someone who necessarily signs up to every aspect of our agenda, she's someone who has challenged the corruption of the conservative corruption in her state, which definitely maps onto this idea that you need a reformist brand of Republicans.

DOUTHAT: There are a lot of politicians who have gestured toward this sort of reformist Republicanism without there being a lot of policy substance behind it. Huckabee's campaign was a great example of that. We refer a lot in the book to the party of Sam's Club. It's the idea of a working-class conservatism. That's a line a we lifted from Tim Pawlenty, the governor of Minnesota, who commented that the GOP "can't just be the party of the country club, it needs to be the party of Sam's Club." If you look at Pawlenty's rhetorical trajectory and the way he has presented himself in Minnesota politics, it broadly aligns with what we're talking. The difficulty with Pawlenty, as with Huckabee, is that there haven't been a lot of, frankly, ideas, policy ideas, for these people to latch on to. The big danger for the Republican Party--and also for the country, because you need two robust parties--is that as things go bad for Republicans, the savviest Republican politicians will just copy Democratic ideas. And they'll just say, "Well, I'm for that, too." Pawlenty's done that to some extent. To take the famous Phyllis Schlafly line from the Goldwater era, we need "a choice, not an echo." Republicans need to provide a choice to Americans. They need to change, but they can't just copy the Democrats. When they change, they need ideas of their own.

SALAM: You see a lot of defense politics right now. Pawlenty barely won reelection, so it's understandable that he's playing it as cautiously as he is. But the problem is that Republicans are going to keep playing defense until they frame some sort of larger, attractive policies. It's about which narratives make sense in the context of this historical environment, and which ones really do connect with the needs of this all-important group of voters.

What has to happen before Republicans, broadly-speaking, make this kind of transition? Do you need electoral disaster? Do you need a decade in the wilderness? Or can it be more, you know, willful?
DOUTHAT: I think it can happen earlier. If you look at the parallel moment for the Democrats, insofar as there was one, it was the late 1960s and early 1970s and then into the Carter era--the crisis of the old Democratic majority. That took arguably decades for the Democrats to find their way back. But nothing is predetermined in American politics. Everything happens a lot faster now. There's a lot more pressure, a lot more coverage. Also, that old Democratic majority was a lot stronger than the Republican majority that's cracking up now. So the old Democratic majority took a lot long to break up, so it was a lot easier for the Democrats to say, "Well, we don't need to change" and so on.

SALAM: When you look at the elections that we had in the 2000s, including 2002, it's amazing how well the Democrats performed, despite their lackluster messaging. They just have a tremendous amount of strength that's built on fundamental demographic facts about the country.So I'm a little less sanguine than Ross, especially if you have a victory this time around running a campaign that's basically Bush III. That's something people are very comfortable with. It's something that the network of analysts and consultants are very comfortable with. They're comfortable getting their policies talking points from the same place. They don't want to change, despite the fact that actually the landscape is radically different. Right now, Republicans have an economic message that's basically, "Hey, the economy's been great" or "Oil. We're going to dig for it in Alaska." That's not something that's going to be robust enough to challenge and counteract these strong, long-term Democratic advantages. So that's something that definitely worries me.  

How does McCain fit into this landscape?
DOUTHAT: The trouble for McCain is that his broad overarching brand as a reformer, as someone who's challenged GOP orthodoxy, as someone who's broken with the party establishment--that's exactly the right brand for this year and it's exactly the right brand for the GOP. It's just that on the specific issues where McCain has a reformist record, they tend to be these boutique issues that don't connect as much with working- and middle-class Americans. You know, McCain is the champion of anti-tobacco legislation, he's the champion of campaign-finance reform. And now his big break on Republican orthodoxy--which he's walking back from--is global warming. That would actually raise the price of gas at a time when gas prices are skyrocketing. His problem has always been that he's not as good talking about kitchen-table issue--talking about health care, talking about education, talking about jobs. And if kitchen-table issues are what the Republican Party needs to address in the long-term, they're definitely what the Republican Party needs to address in a recession year. It's tough for him in that sense.

Especially, I think, because Obama is pretty skilled at speaking about economic issues and reaching out into Republican territory.
SALAM: Obama is someone who's incredibly, keenly intelligent. He's spent a lot of time in the trenches working with working-class people, and someone who's very good at weaving together a narrative that connects faith and family, the broader economic environment and the challenges that poses to working families.

DOUTHAT: If you look at the way Obama has talked about religion--he gave a speech on faith-based initiatives just the other day--this is a terrain that Republicans have traditionally owned: the intersection of churches with social stability in America. Obviously we think that's territory Republicans should continue to own, but obviously it's not territory that John McCain is very comfortable on. He's more comfortable talking about honor and duty and martial values than the role churches should play in fighting poverty. There are advantages for the Democrats in the personalities of the candidates and in the issues they tend to be interested in. McCain was the perfect Republican candidate, in a way, for 2000--for a time of economic good times when the country was in the mood to have a president who's main theme was shared sacrifice. That's what McCain is most comfortable talking about: everyone pulling together for a cause greater than themselves. And that's obviously a powerful political theme, and it contributes to his enduring popularity. But it's a less powerful theme in a recession year.

You don't sound particularly optimistic about McCain's chances.
DOUTHAT: His huge advantage is just trust and experience. That isn't going to go away, and there's not anything Obama can do about that, I think. If McCain pulls it out, it'll just be a matter of voters getting into the voting booth and deciding they can't entrust American foreign policy to someone with as little experience as Obama has. So I think that's McCain's biggest advantage. But the policy landscape may just be too unfavorable for him across the board.

It's all about Obama, then: can we trust him or not? McCain's almost the default choice.
SALAM: Absolutely.