As Republicans prepare in Tampa for their convention to at last get underway, the mood of the party is vastly different from four years ago.<\/p>\n
On the day John McCain delivered his acceptance speech to the St. Paul convention, I wrote in the Wall Street Journal<\/em> that the GOP was \u201ca party that doubts itself.\u201d\u00a0 There were many causes for lack of self-confidence.\u00a0 But none was so corrosive as the failure of spending restraint in Republican congresses and the Bush Administration from 2001 to 2006.<\/p>\n Social conservatives felt with good reason that the Bush Administration had gone to bat for the issues they cared about.\u00a0 From the top down, the administration was sincerely committed to what is sometimes termed the family agenda and was effective at pursuing it.<\/p>\n National security conservatives were generally on board with Mr. Bush\u2019s prosecution of the War on Terror, particularly after the late 2006 announcement of the surge in Iraq ended a period of corrosive passivity.<\/p>\n But federal spending and the size and scope of government were different matters.\u00a0 The late Clinton years\u2019 budget surpluses and declining federal debt had created new expectations about the fiscal management of the government.\u00a0 New standards made even less tolerable the jump up in domestic spending, not to mention the failure after much fanfare to address the erosion of Social Security\u2019s solvency.\u00a0 The financial crisis was still to come, but once secure elements of the GOP\u2019s base were already drifting away when the party met in Minnesota.<\/p>\n The Obama Team effectively played on that disillusionment in the fall, and of course there was the Democrat\u2019s calm, focused bearing when the housing bubble burst compared to Senator McCain\u2019s overwrought response.\u00a0 But even in August, those who had once trusted the GOP on economics and restraint of government were in doubt and drift.<\/p>\n Things are very different in Tampa today.<\/p>\n A lot of it has to do with the performance of the Obama administration.\u00a0 Over the last three and a half years, trillion-dollar bailouts, stimulus programs, deficits and debt increases have tumbled out of the White House one after another.\u00a0 The president has assured us that this unprecedented spending was the price of recovery.\u00a0 But if so, the country feels cheated.\u00a0 For when the merchandise was delivered and the box opened, no recovery was inside.\u00a0 The proportion of adult Americans with jobs today is lower than the day the president took office.<\/p>\n So along comes Mitt Romney.<\/p>\n In American history, no nominee of either party has ever had a better claim on knowing first hand how job creation works in America or on mastery of the management skills needed to fix the government\u2019s spending and unfunded entitlement crises.\u00a0 He brings the right experience and abilities to the national table at the right time.<\/p>\n Pundits have been telling us that the former Massachusetts governor should downplay the Paul Ryanesque emphasis on the controlling budget in favor of more talk about jobs and growth.<\/p>\n