The way back: '08 is the best revenge.

THIS time, let's not fight among ourselves. It can be healthy for parties to engage in intramural recriminations after a defeat. But there really is no need for a Republican bloodbath this time. Everyone knows why Republicans lost so badly, and no faction of the party can take or escape all of the blame. Both moderates and conservatives lost, and both the congressional Republicans and the president contributed to the defeat.

Republicans lost because of setbacks in Iraq, scandal, and the absence of a reform agenda. Those last two factors combined to create the perception that Republicans were more interested in self-preservation than in the public good. None of these failures have distinctively moderate or conservative fingerprints on them.

After past election defeats, influential Republicans and the press argued that social conservatives were the culprits. This time, I suspect that this sentiment will largely be confined to the press, and echoed only by fringe players in the party. In 1992, social conservatives were sufficiently new to the party that a purge could plausibly be threatened. They are now too integrated into the party for that to happen. They also have more media allies to help them make their case than they did then, and those media allies are more influential among Republicans than they were then.

It helps that the political case against social conservatives is absurd. They fared better than--which is to say, not quite as disastrously as--the Republicans did. Their marriage initiatives outperformed Republican candidates in most places, and Democrats had either to co-opt them or to surrender to them to win a few districts.

A POLITICAL GAME PLAN

So as enjoyable as a Republican civil war would be, there may not be many people inside the party willing to wage it. Here are a few ideas on what Republicans should do instead.

Don't write off the blue states, but write off the blue districts. The remaining northeastern Republicans say that it's urgent for the party to cater to the voters of their region. The party can't just be a southern club. They're right on the second point, but not the first. Over the next few years, Republicans are almost certainly going to lose more House and Senate seats in the places that John Kerry carried in 2004. When Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins retire, Maine may start electing Democrats. If Republicans can win some of the districts that Bush carried in 2004, however, they can make net gains.

The first priority should be to take back the red districts that Republicans lost because of scandal. That's one seat in Texas, two in Pennsylvania, one in Ohio, and maybe one in Florida, right there--which is a third of the way to a majority. The second priority should be to reclaim the red seats that were lost because of temporary factors such as the president's (or the Republican governor's) unpopularity. Ten to fifteen seats in this category might be reclaimable. Third should be to take the districts that, until this year, were trending Republican. The most promising area for growth is in the Midwest, and especially the vote-rich upper Midwest, which is both socially conservative and increasingly economically dynamic.

Of course the party should try to recruit strong candidates in the Northeast. And if the political climate looks favorable to Republicans in 2007 and 2008, then by all means they should spend money there. But the party's strategy, especially its legislative strategy, should be geared toward driving red and pink areas of the country away from Nancy Pelosi, not toward making the northeastern rump of the party comfortable, when those two imperatives conflict (as they frequently will). Blue-district Republicans and red-state Democrats will both hate the idea of having to vote on socially conservative amendments, for example. Republicans ought to push for such amendments anyway.

Cull the weak. All incumbent Republicans who ran lousy campaigns in 2006 should be discouraged from running to get their seats back. Anne Northup in Kentucky was advised to close her campaign by drawing a contrast between the parties, and chose the traditional warm-and-fuzzy ending instead. Melissa Hart of Pennsylvania was advised to take her challenger seriously over the summer, and didn't. John Hostettler of Indiana wanted to run his campaign in his own idiosyncratic way. All three lost. New candidates ought to run next time.

Republicans have paid dearly for their clubbishness. John Boehner, to his credit, urged his Ohio colleague Bob Ney to leave Congress--but more than a year after it was clear that Ney's ethics had gotten him in serious trouble. Tom DeLay stuck around too long. Don Sherwood of Pennsylvania, whose mistress accused him of choking her, should never have made it to the ballot. Ditto Senator Conrad Burns of Montana: Any other Republican candidate would have won that seat, and freed up resources to win others.

THE POLICY FIGHT

Dust off the president's veto pen. The veto packs a massive punch in determining policy. It is worth 17 Senate votes and 73 House votes. The president can block a lot of bad legislation by using it. President Bush has used it only once, largely because he did not think it would help Republicans for him to veto legislation that emerged from a Republican Congress. Whatever the wisdom of that calculation, it no longer applies.

The president can't veto everything he dislikes, of course. Democrats will almost certainly revert to the strategy Senate majority leader George Mitchell used against Bush's father. He would send popular liberal legislation to the president, and Bush would have to choose between alienating his base by signing it or disappointing the public by vetoing it. Much of Bill Clinton's 1992 platform consisted of pledges to sign the bills Bush had vetoed. Democrats seeking the White House in 2008 will want to set traps for the president on stem-cell research, price controls for prescription drugs, and many other issues. Republicans will have to cut a deal on some of them, as they are already suggesting they will on the minimum wage.

Sometimes congressional Republicans will want to pass the buck to the president, voting for popular bills they know are flawed and getting him to veto them. For the party as a whole, however, it will usually be best if such legislation never reaches Bush's desk. When nice-sounding legislation is bottled up in Congress, and especially when it is filibustered, the politicians responsible take some heat--but the public pays more attention to the drama of a veto than to the absence of action.

Fight for judges. The Democrats' opposition to Bush's judicially conservative nominees was a big issue in 2002 and 2004, and hardly an issue at all in 2006. It's no coincidence that Republicans did well in the first two elections and not the third (although it's obviously not the whole story either). Republicans can win these fights, even in the minority.

Try bipartisanship. Seriously. Conservatives are suspicious of bipartisanship. To them, it sounds like collusion, a conspiracy against the public. And so it can be. But there may be areas where Republicans, if they are creative and flexible, can advance conservative policy objectives by working with Democrats. Finding such areas of agreement need not be inconsistent with either party's playing hardball to win the next election.

Besides, improved policy is the point of political victories. So we should not avoid making it for fear that Democrats will be able to take part of the credit. It is possible that Republicans will extend their hands only to have Democrats slap them away. But if so, voters will reward Republicans for trying.

The War on Terror is one area where it may be possible to work together. We had bipartisanship on the issue from 9/11 through late 2003, so it can't be impossible to attain. But that will mean allowing Congress to be more involved in national-security policy than the president has wanted even when Republicans ran it.

Education is another issue where some cooperation is possible. The Democrats will want to spend more money, of course. But there is widespread agreement that the formula the government uses to figure out which schools are succeeding and which failing needs to be adjusted, and even agreement on the outlines of how to adjust it.

The president need not give up even on the possibility of reforming Social Security and the tax code--if, that is, he is willing to pay more attention to conservatives' interests than to conservative think tanks. The Democrats have refused every Republican offer to parley as long as personal accounts are on the table. Republicans could agree to take them off the table for the next two years. In return, however, they should ask Democrats to take tax increases off the table. Each party would be giving up the proposal that gives the other party hives--and neither party would have an excuse to stay away from talks.

If tax hikes and personal accounts are off the table, the only way to improve the program's solvency is to slow the growth of Social Security benefits. Probably the most palatable way to do that, for the public and for Democrats, is the "progressive indexing" that Bush proposed too late in the game in 2005. If Democrats still balk, Republicans should sweeten the deal by agreeing to one of the Democrats' pet ideas: using tax credits to help low-wage workers build financial assets. The only thing wrong with this liberal proposal is that it should have been conservatives' first. If conservatives are right in thinking that making more Americans into investors will expand the constituency for free-market, limited-government reforms, they should jump at this chance.

Personal accounts are a cleaner way of expanding the new investor class. But the chief way they would do so would be by letting low-wage workers invest some of their money. A tax-credit proposal would accomplish the same goal indirectly. And our future national debt would be reduced at the same time: What's not to like? Maybe Alan Greenspan could be coaxed to broker the deal. Republicans ought to be able to get a better bargain than they did the last time he brokered one, in 1983, when they had many fewer House seats.

Tax reform also presents an opportunity that should be seized. The principal liberal objections to the type of tax reform that conservatives have proposed are that they would increase the deficit or favor the rich. But it should be possible to devise a plan that simplifies the tax code, promotes growth, and helps families without raising either objection. I outlined one in these pages a few months ago ("A Tax Reform to Run With," April 24).

The plan would expand the tax credit for children to $5,000, replace the standard deduction with a tax credit, and eliminate almost all itemized deductions. It would get rid of most tax credits and the alternative minimum tax. It would cut tax rates on estates, capital gains, and dividends. It would feature two tax rates instead of the current six: The top rate would be 30 percent, and taxpayers in the lower bracket would pay 15 percent.

The result would be a return to the simplified tax code that followed the 1986 tax reform, but with higher rates and better treatment of investments. The tax burden would shift slightly upward (even the way liberals calculate these things). The richest taxpayers would probably end up paying a higher average tax rate. But their marginal tax rate--the rate that most affects their economic incentives and thus growth--would go down.

The result wouldn't be the flat tax or national sales tax of supply-siders' dreams. But it would bring their dreams a little closer to reality than could otherwise happen, and promote some goods--such as recognition of the financial investment that raising kids represents--to which supply-siders have too often been blind. And since the plan eliminates the alternative minimum tax, which disproportionately hits blue states, Democrats would have an added incentive to get on board.

Would Democrats try to hijack tax reform to push through tax increases? They probably couldn't sustain a majority in Congress for tax hikes, and if they could the president would win the resulting veto fight. Republicans had less political strength during the 1986 tax reform, and should not be afraid to engage now.

THE PATH OF REALISM

The Republican party is unlikely to tear itself apart because a few of its members believe, as the Republican Main Street Partnership, a moderate outfit, put it, that the "far Right" was "solely responsible for Democratic gains." The greater danger is that the bulk of the party will act on a conservative conventional wisdom about the election defeats that is almost as mistaken. It is not the case that Republicans lost simply because party leaders were insufficiently committed to conservative principles, or that a renewed devotion to those principles will bring with it renewed power.

Too many conservatives have bought the comforting myth that Republicans would have won if only they had not enacted such big-government policies as the prescription-drug benefit. But the truth is that the public, to the extent that it is dissatisfied with the drug benefit, wants it to be more generous rather than less. Moreover, conservatives did not abandon the Republicans; independent voters did.

Conservatism ceases to be a type of statecraft and becomes an ideology when it loses its political grounding, which is to say, its connection to reality. For conservatives to make headway in today's daunting circumstances, they are going to have to find a way to maintain their principles while abjuring wishful thinking.

Mr. Ponnuru, an NR senior editor, is the author of The Party of Death: The Democrats, the Media, the Courts, and the Disregard for Human Life.