Can ther Republican Party make necessary adjustments?

Charlie Cook comments on the report the Republican National Committee released this week and discusses how difficult this may prove to be. The title of his article says it all: The GOP Faces 2 Stark Choices: Change or go over the Cliff. While the party leadership wants to moderate its positions to reach out to a broader constituency, activists in the party see not only no reason to change, they want to double down on the party's existing positions.

The past 96 hours should provide thinking Republicans both hope and despair about their party’s future. The hope centers on the Republican National Committee’s “Growth & Opportunity Project” report, an autopsy of sorts that looks at the GOP’s disastrous 2012 election and offers some highly constructive ideas. The party should take them seriously in addressing the problems that turned more than a few winnable Senate seats and a presidential election into bitter defeats. The despair, on the other hand, comes from the Conservative Political Action Conference, an annual congregation of the younger element of the party’s most conservative 5 percent, this year made up chiefly of those who think last year’s problem was that the party wasn’t conservative enough. Driving over to the Gaylord’s National Harbor Hotel and Convention Center to meet with a campaign manager Saturday afternoon, I passed a group on a street corner advocating the impeachment of President Obama. It was a useful reminder of just how far out the extremes—on the right in the GOP and on the left in the Democratic Party—really are.