Can GOP learn post-election lessons from '80s Dems?

David Frum, who served in the George W. Bush White House, has received considerable post-election attention due to his blunt criticisms of the Republican Party and his tough-love approach toward recommending a modernization of the GOP.

In his column for The Daily Beast, Frum smartly analyzes the many differences in the nation today related to demography, economics, politics, science and culture compared to the United States of 1980 when Ronald Reagan won the presidency.

Frum, who just released an e-book offering his explanation of why Mitt Romney lost the 2012 election, wrote that conservatism in the 21st Century must become “economically inclusive, environmentally responsible, culturally modern, and intellectually credible.”

Gary Hart vs. Walter Mondale debate, 1984

Then he offers an interesting comparison to the Democratic Party of the 1980s that was divided and adrift. The Dems of that era, he suggested, could teach the GOP of 2012 a few lessons.

Here’s a portion:

“In those days, it was the Democratic Party that fought internal battles over the need for change: Gary Hart, Les Aspin, and other ‘Atari Democrats’ (as they were called back when Atari was a cool, new brand) vs. Walter Mondale, Tip O’Neill, and other machine pols who sneered back, ‘Where’s the beef?’

“Yet in the end, it was the Atari Democrats who won. A century before, a great British conservative, the Marquess of Salisbury, warned, ‘The commonest error in politics is sticking to the carcass of dead policies.’ The Democrats of the 1980s and 1990s had the courage and honesty to identify which of their policies had died and then ruthlessly discard the carcasses. It falls to modern conservatives now to heed Salisbury’s advice: to abandon what is obsolete—and to meet the challenge of the new.”