The NR editors are right that Republican congressional candidates should focus more on making a positive case for themselves. Republicans are missing a major opportunity on tax policy. They might also be missing a chance on health care policy, but it is not clear that Republican candidates would have any idea how to seize that opportunity even they so desired.

Some scaled-down version of Robert Stein’s combination of an expanded child tax credit and cuts on investment income should be low hanging fruit for Republicans. It makes the economy more efficient and it shows that the direct benefits of cutting taxes don’t all have to flow to high-earners. Such a policy would not be the first choice of some conservatives and it would get eye rolls from the Wall Street Journal, but those conservatives would not start voting for pro-Obamacare Democrats, while swing voters would have a new reason to vote GOP.

The politics of health care reform is more tricky. On the one hand, some positive conservative policy that addresses coverage in necessary if Obamacare is going to be repealed. All those people who have gotten health insurance through Medicaid expansion and credits through the exchanges aren’t just going to be left hanging.

There is no single consensus Republican alternative to Obamacare, but the major problem is that Republicans lack a set of best practices for talking about market-oriented health care reform. This is partly a product of history. Health care policy was never a big part of the conservative heroic age of the 1980s and 1990s in the same way as tax cuts, defeating communism, Giuliani’s crime fighting and reforming welfare. Health care was what Democrats wanted to talk about. The job of conservatives was to stand up against socialized medicine. If Republicans had to say something about a positive health care policy, they would likely talk about tort reform, mumble something vague about getting government out of health care (though not out of Medicare of course) and then try to change the subject to capital gains taxes or missile defense or… anything really.

This means that Republican candidates don’t have a playbook for how to talk about what a post-Obamacare health care system they might want. Look at Romney. When he tried to talk about “choice” in health care insurers, he ended up talking about how he likes being able to fire people. One way to look at the story is that Romney was an awkward, out-of-touch rich guy. But Romney was actually far more articulate in talking about health care policy than any of his Republican primary opponents (with the partial exception of Rick Santorum). Romney is probably better at talking about health care policy than any of the current Republican Senate candidates and even he flubbed it.

It would be great if several Republican candidates took the lead in explaining something like the health care plans produced by James Capretta and Avik Roy, but most Republican candidates don’t know where to start and don’t know how to avoid the landmines. This is where the institutions of the center-right are failing. For all the money that is spent on bludgeoning the public with redundant thirty second ads, Republican donors could work with the policy intellectuals to test (through both opinion polling and focus groups) how best to explain market-oriented health care reform and how best to answer the most obvious liberal objections to those reforms – and then share those findings with candidates. Candidates would be more likely to support positive reforms if they had a set of strategies for explaining those policies to the public. As it is, we are left counting on the courage, and policy sophistication of candidates locked in close races. We should encourage them to show more courage, but a better center-right institutional strategy for promoting health care reform will make it easier for the average Republican candidate to stand up for a positive alternative to Obamacare.