As the Right crawls from the rubble of the Bush-Rove-Paulson domestic Reign of Error, one key conservative sees mere opposition to President Barack Obama as the path back to power.

“One thing that we can all do is stop assuming that the way to beat them is with better policy ideas right now,” radio host Rush Limbaugh told some 2,000 raucous supporters at the Conservative Political Action Conference. Speaking at the Shoreham Hotel’s Regency Ballroom — amid enough cheers, shouts, and standing ovations to adorn a presidential nominee’s national-convention acceptance speech — Limbaugh added, “This is philosophy, folks.” He seemed to urge conservatives to promote first things, rather than programmatic specifics.

Limbaugh is an astute political observer with a titanium-like commitment to conservative and free-market principles. If GOP leaders had possessed half his vertebrae in recent years, they would not have gotten themselves, the party, the movement, and the nation into such deep trouble.

Still, Limbaugh’s advice here looks like a losing hand. For many years, the GOP prided itself as the party of ideas. Thanks to the intellectually rigorous Ronald Reagan (as Reagan in His Own Hand and other posthumously published collections of his handwritten speeches and letters prove), imaginative members of Congress such as former Rep. Jack Kemp (R., N.Y.), thoughtful editorialists at places such as the Wall Street Journal, and think-tank scholars at the Heritage Foundation, the Cato Institute, and other research institutions, the American Right advocated marginal tax-rate cuts, welfare reform, school choice, and the roll-back of Communism. These thought exercises eventually became game-changing public policies.

If conservatives, libertarians, and Republicans hope to compete for and eventually retake Congress and the White House, we cannot live on sophistry alone. It also is pointless to sit around and congratulate ourselves on the notion that “We won the debate” on any issue. When taxes and spending are climbing like Hamas rockets, bank nationalization is just around the corner, and Uncle Sam’s current stakes in AIG, Citigroup, GM, and Chrysler are mere down payments on further federal outlays, yesterday’s “debate victories” are moot.

The year 2009 has become 1981, except that Jimmy Carter has been replaced not with Ronald Reagan, but with Walter Mondale, sans the Norwegian woodenness. Conservatives and free-marketeers will have to re-debate and re-win virtually every issue we thought we had settled. This need to recapture the ground we once held is just one more excruciating legacy of Team Bush-Rove-Paulson’s Brooks Brothers socialism.

It is important for the Right to acknowledge how we reached this spooky place.

President Obama is busy waving the runner past third base on toward the home plate of socialism. Sadly, our side — our former president and the GOP — propelled American socialism all the way to third base.

George W. Bush holstered his veto pen for six years as the GOP Congress sent him a farm bailout, a highway bill, an expanded ethanol mandate, and numerous appropriations measures — all marinated in red ink and encrusted with pork. Bush demanded the multi-trillion-dollar Medicare drug entitlement, and Republican majority leader Tom DeLay extended the 15-minute House vote for three hours so he could dragoon enough Republicans to pass the legislation.

After our leaders surrendered their principles, the American people correctly declared the GOP philosophically bankrupt. So, in 2006, they handed the Senate to Harry Reid and the House to Nancy Pelosi. Two years later, after the GOP kept growing government, voters gave the White House to the Democrats.

And so, our side wound up with neither principles, nor power. Now we are out in the cold.

The architect of this strategy was none other than now ubiquitous Karl Rove. He gives advice daily on the Fox News Channel and weekly in the Wall Street Journal. He even spoke at CPAC.

Why is “the architect” giving advice, even as conservatives escape the collapsed structure built from his blueprints? Imagine clicking on the TV and catching a show called Cooking with Typhoid Mary. Why would anyone take flying lessons from the pilot of the Hindenburg, rather than U.S. Airways’s Captain Sully?

It’s time for some basic accountability. A big step in the Right’s recovery would be for Karl Rove finally to clam up, fly back to Texas, curl up beside a cactus, and contemplate how he helped wreck our party and our movement.

Back to our adversaries. It is fine to criticize the Left and explain all that is wrong with their ideas. But that is not enough. Today’s righties must offer concrete counterproposals and common-sense ideas that will take today’s sad song and make it better. Whether they agree with us or not, the American people want more than just choruses of “No!” Most people will give us credit for putting something serious on the table rather than simply tearing down liberal proposals.

Second, our ideas should not be a grab-bag of this, that, and the other. Instead, our proposals should arise from, and indeed celebrate, key principles of the free-market and conservative philosophies, and of the American Founding. As Thomas Jefferson enunciated in the Declaration of Independence, these tenets recognize that we all are endowed with certain inalienable rights, among them “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” I also humbly would add these five core concepts:

*Individual freedom

*Personal responsibility

*Limited government

*Free enterprise

*Peace through strength

Third, the bailouts, fiscal injections, and nationalizations launched by George W. Bush and perpetuated under President Obama are foolish, dangerous, and alien to America’s basic traditions. Instead, the Right boldly should promote economic freedom and growth as alternatives to having Uncle Sam babysit us. Rather than spend $700 billion on TARP I and TARP II, for example, America could devote $640 billion to cancel the corporate tax completely for 2009 and 2010. Such a dramatic step might buoy the sinking stock market and keep businesses afloat.

Free-marketeers should encourage entrepreneurs, new products, and new businesses. Here’s one way to do so.

Imagine you invent the next iPod, the long-anticipated sky hook, or a beer glass that automatically replenishes itself. Present your brainstorm to the U.S. Patent Office. If it judges you sane and grants you a patent, you may spend up to, say, ten years to exploit that patent, hire as many people as you want, and make as much money as you can — tax free.

That should be stimulating.

Fourth, whenever possible, the Right should offer our ideas as choices, honoring the right of Americans to choose how to live our lives.

For example, rather than demand a flat tax for everyone, we should make it an option called “Tax Freedom.” Anyone who likes the 67,400-page U.S. Tax Code and its nooks and crannies should be welcome to it. Those who prefer a flat tax at, say, 15 to 17 percent with few if any deductions should be free to embrace it.

“It’s your tax. It’s your choice.”

How about medical freedom? Seniors who admire Medicare and poor people who like Medicaid should be free to stick with those programs. But if not, let’s replace their subsidies with vouchers that they can use to purchase health savings accounts and whatever private health insurance suits their needs, not the government’s.

“It’s your medicine. It’s your choice.”

And why not job freedom? American workers who like unions should be free to join them. If not, no one ever should be forced to join a union as a condition of employment, and certainly not until after casting a secret ballot in a clean union election. Better yet, a national right-to-work law would respect a woman’s right to choose . . . whether or not to join a union. Naturally, this would apply to men, too.

“It’s your job. It’s your choice.”

If conservatives and free-marketeers frame issues this way, the Left will have to agree with us or oppose not just our ideas on the merits, but more fundamentally, the freedom of Americans to make these choices, whether the Left likes them or not. If the Left wants to attack freedom, per se, let them.

“It’s their doom. It’s their choice.”

Finally, self-employed people and renters are almost invisible on America’s political radar. If you run your own business from your apartment, no one in Washington ever has heard of you. The Right should speak up for more freedom and better public policies to address the needs of this huge slice of the population.

America should have an individual market in health insurance, rather than one based solely on group plans tied to working for The Man. This will help the self-employed, workers between engagements, and anyone who wishes to transport a health policy from job to job to personal business to graduate school, and from one hometown to the next.

Also, 37 percent of Americans rent rather than own property. Why on earth can’t we write off part of our rent checks, just as homeowners deduct their mortgage-interest payments?

As soon as Republicans start speaking up for renters, they will catch the attention of millions of city dwellers who tend to vote Democrat and simply assume Republicans either don’t care about them or do not know they exist.

Politicians focus night and day on the needs and wants of homeowners and mortgage holders. Renters might as well be on Mercury. Republicans should offer a renters’ tax deduction as an opening bid to begin competing for this huge and untapped population cohort.

Every American also should be free to open a Housing Savings Account in which he could deposit, say, $10,000 annually, tax free. That money could accumulate and grow, and then be withdrawn tax free to finance either a home down payment or the security deposit and first few years of rent or lease payments on an apartment. Uncle Sam should stop worrying about whether Americans occupy sprawling suburban ranch homes or cramped studios in skyscrapers. Government’s sole concern should be to help Americans afford not to sleep on the sidewalks at night, so they do not menace others. This policy, at long last, would treat homeowners, renters, and lessees equally.

Limbaugh was correct when he observed, “Our own movement has members trying to throw Ronald Reagan out while the Democrats know they can’t get accomplish what they want unless they appeal to Reagan voters.”

Ronald Reagan’s message should be as central to today’s GOP as FDR’s and LBJ’s messages are to the Democratic party, even in 2009.

The Right should harness Ronald Reagan’s principles, optimism, faith in the American people’s potential, and his understanding of the need to communicate constantly, clearly, and convincingly. Beyond that, bold, new, aggressive, pro-market policies should be the basic building blocks of the conservative/free-market movement’s agenda for reclaiming the early 21st century.

This formula smells like victory.