Jay Cost of RealClearPolitics thinks that the gold medal for faulty analysis this election cycle should go to pundits who say NY-23 shows the Republican Party deeply divided, since, Cost says, “the GOP’s divisions – whatever they may be – are utterly, totally dwarfed by the continuing divisions in the Democratic Party. Not only in scale, but in significance. Republicans might be divided over the symbolic role of Sarah Palin in the party, but Democrats are divided over what to do about health care.”

Well, I agree that the tale of irreconcilable differences within the GOP is exaggerated, but Cost is dead wrong. The Democrats’ divisions are a source of their strength — that is, they realize that some districts require blue dog candidates, while others will accept staunch liberals — while the GOP’s differences are a source of continued fumbling. Of course you’re going to get a complicated and perhaps immobile legislative performance if you’re bringing into the party all kinds of different interests. But legislating should never be easy (it’s not meant to be), and in partisan politics winning in the first place is the prerequisite to any kind of policy.

The bigger weakness that I see in the GOP isn’t the fractiousness of their primaries or the intractability of their ideological base — the Dems have a lot of that, too — but the demands of the base and the party establishment alike for programmatic conformity. The GOP Congress never gave Bush the trouble that the Democratic Congress is giving Obama. Thus when voters looked at the wreck of the Bush administration, they rightly blamed Republicans everywhere for what Bush had done. Back in their glory days before 1994, congressional Democrats were experts at doing whatever they needed to do to create at least the appearance of putting loyalty to their districts above loyalty to party and president. In practice it was a shame, but they understood what worked. The Republicans, by contrast, have a one-boot-fits-all mentality, both in the primaries and in the legislatures. Republicans who do stick to their own consciences and their districts’ interests, like Ron Paul and Walter Jones, are targets for establishment-backed primary opposition. And of course, Bush strong-armed a great many reluctant Republican congressmen into voting for the prescription drug add-on to Medicare. The GOP demands much more conformity than the Democrats, for whom nonconformity — division — is less of a problem. (Though they certainly do have their sources of bitterness as well, as we saw in the Obama-Clinton contest. But they managed to prevent those tensions from exploding.)

The Republicans could do with a lot more productive dissension within Congress, and less tripping over their own feet in primaries. (For what it’s worth, I have a lot more respect for the Club for Growth model than Daniel Larison does. Conservatives should be content with clobbering liberal Republicans and pushing the party to the Right, even if it takes a longer time to win back power. But they should also be smart enough to reconcile a right-wing program with the diversity of regional cultures. And of course, they ought to wise up about the monstrous foreign policy they’ve been supporting, and the insincerity of movement conservatism’s professions of small-government principle. Antiwar Republicans like Hostettler got clobbered just like pro-war Republicans did in 2006 and 2008, but I suspect that was in part because there were so few antiwar Republicans that the public couldn’t believe such a thing really existed.)

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