Patience & Fortitude. At this time we need the former. - Some See Risks For the G.O.P. in New Strength.

I was going to put in the title, after G.O.P., (national) to distinguish it from the state. But based on what we have been seeing, hubris, overreaching, arrogance, I decided against it.

Excerpts from a 01-24-05 article in The New York Times:

Some See Risks For the G.O.P. in New Strength

President Bush begins his second term with the Republican Party in its strongest position in over 50 years, but his clout is already being tested by Republican doubts about his domestic agenda, rising national unease about Iraq and the threat of second-term overreaching, officials in both parties say.

[The president's advisers say Mr. Bush] had at most two years before he faced the ebb that historically saps the authority of a second-term incumbent, a relatively short time to sell his far-reaching agenda. And Republicans say his situation could be complicated by the absence of an obvious heir, opening the way for competing wings of the party to battle over details and tactics on the very issues Mr. Bush is embracing.

Richard Norton Smith, a presidential scholar who is director of the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum, said the Republican Party had "come closer now than they've been at any time in my lifetime" to being the nation's majority party. But Mr. Smith said historical cycles over the past century suggested that its dominance might be coming to a close.

"The calendar alone tells you this conservative cycle is long in the tooth," he said. "Add to that the divisions, or latent divisions, that exist with your own coalition. Once Bush is removed from the scene, and once he becomes in effect a lame duck, all those tensions are there."

And Gary Bauer, a conservative who ran for the Republican presidential nomination in 2000, said that while he applauded Mr. Bush's ambition in pursuing two major domestic goals - overhauling Social Security and the tax code - those issues, if handled incorrectly, could undercut Mr. Bush's long-term goal for the party.

"They could provide the president's opponents with fodder for some of the old canards, that Republicans don't want a social safety net, that they're the party of the rich, all those things," Mr. Bauer said. "It's going to take a very astute effort and massive amounts of presidential involvement to keep that from happening."

Democrats, even while struggling with their own party divisions and confusion, are showing signs of coalescing into an aggressive opposition party, especially on issues like judicial appointments and Social Security.

With this presidential election, the Democrats lost a nearly 30-year advantage in party identification in presidential elections; in a survey of voters leaving the polls, 37 percent said they were Republican and 37 percent said they were Democrats.

It is a sign of Republican ascendance that the party is already forcing its opponents to re-examine some of their most strongly held positions. Democrats, for example, have been openly discussing whether to decrease their emphasis on one of their touchstone issues, abortion rights, after an election in which Mr. Bush ran aggressively as an opponent of abortion.

[I]t is difficult today to measure whether the Republican successes of 2002 and 2004 were merely a ratification of Mr. Bush himself - a president running for re-election in wartime - or the start of a long-lasting shift to the Republican Party.

David Mayhew, a professor of political science at Yale, suggested that Mr. Bush's . . . had been overstated.

"I do not think this is a lasting, mountainous achievement in terms of building coalitions," Professor Mayhew said. "Knowing what we know now, the presidential election of 2008 is probably a tossup."