Douthat shifts his focus:
[T]he case for decentralization has grown much stronger over the last two years, and my vision of conservative reform has shifted accordingly. Keep in mind that Reihan Salam and I started working on “Grand New Party,” our reformist tome, all the way back in 2005 a time when TARP, the auto bailout, the stimulus package and Obamacare all lay in the future, and the deficit problem seemed serious in the long run but manageable in the short term. I still stand by most of the policy ideas we floated then, and indeed I think that we were more interested in decentralization than some of our right-wing critics gave us credit for. But it’s fair to say that we would lay a different set of emphases if we were writing the same kind of book today, in the wake of two years of crisis and consolidation, than we did in the halcyon days of the housing bubble and Dow 14,000.
E.D. Kain is skeptical.