Editor’s note: We warmly welcome Emil G. Maine as a member of the NextGenGOP team. Emil begins his contributions to our website by writing about lessons that he believes Republicans must learn in order to get back to winning.

In many conservative circles conventional wisdom maintains that the GOP’s crippling ’08 repudiation was an inevitable result of an ailing economy, nationwide Bush fatigue, a confusing Republican presidential pitch, and the mainstream media’s slobbering love affair. While these explanations provide a compelling account for how the GOP came to find itself handing the Democrats the presidency, an extended majority in the house, and a near filibuster proof senate majority, they seem devoid of the sort of reflections that any defeated party should learn from—least it make the same mistakes again.

In many ways the decline of the Republican Party was predestined by the hubris that followed sweeping Republican victories in ’04. Instead of standing by the same conservative ideology that extended the prominence of the GOP, the party carelessly led the largest overall increase in inflation-adjusted federal spending since Lyndon B. Johnson making Republican controlled government the most expensive in 30 years (even after excluding spending on defense and homeland security). It is not simply my intention to point out the mistakes that lead the GOP to its current predicament, but rather to show how hubristic rule lead the Republican Party away from its core values and why our future ascendancy should be receptive to criticism and wary of arrogance.

In what appears to be an endemic problem for those who win, the Democratic Party’s newly developed hubris is not hard to miss. Nancy Pelosi and other party leaders rarely shy away from an opportunity to reflect Republican opposition and criticism by reminding them who won the election. What Pelosi’s comments illustrate, beyond her bad manners, is an emerging opportunity for the GOP to rebuild its brand name and reassert itself into a government dominated by the left. Rahm Emanuel, Obama’s chief of staff, told us that a crisis is an opportunity to do big things. It is my suggestion that in this rare instance the Republican Party should apply Mr. Emmanuel’s advice to its own dilemma. Together we can take this opportunity to recognize that our hubris lead us away from the core conservative values and beliefs that established the prominence of the party in the first place. As arrogance begins to unwind the Democrat’s strangle over government, the next generation of the GOP should be prepared to lead, having learned from the mistakes of the past.

Last 5 posts by Emil G. Maine

• Why America Needs More Clunkers - August 1st, 2009
• A Dishonest Debate - April 24th, 2009
• Picking The Right Fight - April 15th, 2009
• The Limitations of Popularity - April 8th, 2009