illustration Jack Davis for Time mag.

Last Wednesday, Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty, 47, a day after his party suffered its greatest consecutive Congressional defeats since Depression-era elections in 1930 and 1932, stated the obvious. “Nationally, the Republican Party is going to go through a Dr. Phil, self-analysis moment,” he told the AP.

But the Republican Party has been locked in a permanent Dr. Phil moment since the Iowa caucuses in January. The sniping between John McCain and Sarah Palin’s camp is just the latest (and maybe the greatest) showing of inner-party turmoil.

At a moment when changing demographics are favoring young and minority voters, the Republican brand is disintegrating—the once-solid coalition of fiscal conservatives, national security hawks, and social conservatives is unraveling. Young and minority voters may not have been the difference in 2008, but they were solidly behind the overwhelming Democratic turnout, and will be the dominant audience in foreseeable elections. But will they be receptive to whatever message the Republican power structure offers in the next four years?

The election of a 47-year-old half-black man who grew up outside the mainland U.S. might mark the end of the culture wars that has polarized every presidential election since the 60s. That was the GOP’s winning formula: separate the Democratic Party’s coastal elites from its working class base. Republicans employed wedge issues like abortion, affirmative action, and crime to split the Democratic Party in half and win. And it worked: Barack Obama is the first president to win 50 percent of the popular vote since Jimmy Carter’s 1976 post- Watergate victory.

There will be cries for the GOP to return to this divisive, but winning formula. But it didn’t work in 2008, and it wasn’t for lack of trying either.

The emerging Republican direction appears more conservative than pragmatic. The difference between compromise and obstruction will come down to how the House leadership shakes out—Minority leader John Boehner, 58, expects to win another term before inauguration day.

Republicans on the national level are still holding the bag for financial failure. The crisis exposed a rift among Republicans the likes of which we have not seen since the Gerald Ford-Ronald Regan contests in 1976. On the one side, the Young Turks like Rep. Eric Cantor, 45, who wish it was Reaganland all over again, are going to war against spending and taxes. On the other side, are the moderates, like Rep. Adam Putnam, 34, who favored the White House, Senate, and House-endorsed $750 billion rescue legislation.

The bailout legislation is like a scarlet letter for Republican representatives. Those who voted for it are resigning from leadership. Rep. Putnam resigned from the party’s No. 3 leadership position, but Rep. Cantor is likely to be promoted to the No. 2 spot despite engineering that legislation’s initial defeat. Rep. Roy Blunt, 58, formerly the No. 2, resigned Thursday saying—in so many words—that Republicans are losers.

Cantor, Blunt and Boehner have thrown down over leadership roles before, and we can expect a juicy power-grabbing sequel in the 111^th Congress.

Across the Capitol, Senate Republicans are a lonely lot, losing six Senate seats, and maybe more in Georgia and Minnesota. And unlike their House counterparts, senators may be more willing to deal with Democrats. For former red state Republican senators like Maine’s Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe and Iowa’s Chuck Grassley, the new and bluer 2008 electoral map is a brave new world. Republican senators are unlikely to rally behind conservative initiatives rebuking President Obama’s policies, fearing that they will be out of touch with the folks back home.

The Republican Party will likely lurch further right before it comprises or disintegrates, with the House leading the way on the national level. The American Spectator endorsed the fiscal conservatives and defense hawk old guard. Blogger Michelle Malkin demanded Republicans obstruct Democrats no matter the cost. Lou Dobbs won’t shut up about immigration, and McCainiacs rallied against the news media. At the grassroots level things are even worse—activists are turning clocks back to (surprise!) 1980 and siding with Palin. But what about governors not named Sarah? Why isn’t anybody talking about them?

While the national Party is figuring out what do to, governors are quietly experimenting with new Republican mantras. Largely independent from the national head-scratching, governors understand representative government boils down to delivering goods and services.

“‘The other side is worse’ is not a very inspiring bumper sticker,“ said Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, 37. “We’ve got…to apply our principles to the issues that affect people’s lives.” Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush—a moderate (yes, really)—says the 2010 elections will provide a debut for a “conservative agenda [that] can be shown at the state level regarding education, health care and environmental policy.

“We can’t be anti-Hispanic, anti-young person, anti-many things and be surprised when we don’t win elections,” Gov. Bush, 55, said.

But Gov. Bush and Gov. Jindal’s messages are in stark contrast to the House and the grassroots movements’ direction.

Both Govs. Bush and Jindal are in the one region where Republican enthusiasm was high. Turnout was strongest in a crescent that swept from Louisiana to South Carolina. If Republicans are going to get any new ideas, they should start looking, like they have since Barry Goldwater, in the South.

“The South is beginning to look less like the firm foundation of a national Party than the embattled redoubt of a regional one,” middle-America soothsayer George Will wrote.

When the next Congress convenes, 43% percent of the likely 44 Republican senators will be from the South (including Oklahoma and Kentucky).

Essentially the party of Lincoln is over. The party of Nixon’s culture wars will only succeed if the Obama administration fails, and the party of Reagan adheres to its ultra conservative roots despite its 30-year dominance in government.

Yes, even a few days after D-Day there is movement for 2010 and beyond. Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, 61, has re-activated his PAC, there are more Sarah Palin secrets coming down the pike, and Gov. Jindal is the keynote speaker at a major league conservative Christian fundraising ordeal on Nov. 22 in Iowa. Gotta love caucuses.

The five categories under the prize umbrella are those of peace, chemistry, physics, physiology and medicine and literature.

This year, Los Angeles Times reported Tuesday, the Nobel committee awarded the prize for physiology and medicine to French researchers Luc Montagnier, Francoise Barre-Sinoussi and German scientist Harold zur Hausen.

The former are credited with discovering the human strain of the AIDS virus, the latter with proving the “papilloma virus causes cervical cancer.”

Controversy has often surrounded the Nobel Prize and its originator, Swedish dynamite creator Alfred Nobel, and this year’s share centers around two of the aforementioned physiology and medicine winners.

Montagnier and Sinoussi’s discovery was a source of much contention in the 1980s as American researcher Robert Gallo claimed to have discovered HIV himself. The dispute reached a level so bitter that in 1987, President Reagan and French Prime Minister Jacques Chirac negotiated split royalties.

But Gallo’s relief was to be short-lived as 1991 saw his role in the discovery challenged by Montagnier and the French government. While Gallo said he had isolated a virus exactly like the one Montagnier had, Gallo’s patients exhibited a different strain, raising the question that Gallo may have used samples not his own.

In 1994, the U.S. government agreed the French should receive the heftier side of the royalties, a concession that implied Montagnier did, indeed, have a greater, if not the full, role in the momentous discovery than Gallo did.

Within each category, the medal may only be awarded to a maximum of three people. As many research teams require the assistance of many more individuals, that number seems both too small and, depending on the context, inappropriate.

Gallo received neither a prize nor mention. This year’s Nobel citation said that “after the discovery of the virus, several groups contributed to the definitive demonstration of HIV as the cause.” No one specified who those “several groups” were. Gallo did not get the prize simply because of its three-person cap; the committee did not deem his contribution worth even a nominal head nod.

But I have some problems with that. Granted, the Nobel Prize has not always erred on the side of wisdom and foresight. Gandhi was nominated for the peace prize five times, but when 1948 would have made him that winner, he was assassinated. Rather than grant a posthomous medal, though, the committee opted to dole out no peace medals at all that year.

I find both the committee’s intractability and insensitivity ridiculous. Clearly, they didn’t merely neglect Gallo out of deference to the numerical limit. To them, Gallo was insignificant enough to merit a complete lack of acknowledgement. I think that’s tacky at best.

Why not expand the winner number? Or if the alternate individual doesn’t seem worthy of a prize, why not at least issue some verbal recognition?

The Times wrote “Montagnier said he wished that Gallo had shared in the award.”

“‘It is certain that he deserved this as much as us two,’” the winner said.

So whether or not this is a case of Academy Award-like euphoric condescension “all of you deserve this as much as I do, but I’m only saying that because now I’m in the position to have won and to feel magnanimous toward my former rivals” doesn’t matter. Whatever his motives, Montagnier came forth and admitted Gallo deserved a significant degree of credit.

So if the scientist admitted it, why couldn’t the Nobel judges?

Gallo may not have been the sole researcher to have discovered the “human AIDS virus,” and Montagnier may have had a bigger part to play, but that ratio doesn’t strip Gallo the right to some honor (perhaps even his own award?).

Any prize is, by nature, competitive. It cannot belong to all contenders. Otherwise there’d be no point in distinction; if everyone’s distinguished, no one is. But I do think Gallo could have borne some Nobel recognition. These scientists’ discoveries are far too important to accommodate such negligence.

* In the Northern Hemisphere, that is.

Poor stiff ultra-white Mitt Romney did not say “who let the dogs out” at the beginning of this clip. Someone please say it’s a hoax. And let’s hope he didn’t really say that the infant at the end of the clip is wearing “bling bling.” No, god, he did not.

A final note from the Oh God No! file: Does the Billary team really think it will win votes by accusing Obama of being an (egad!) Reagan Lover? We have to ask: Can the country really elect someone president who either can not discern or is unwilling to admit the difference between (1) saying Reagan was a transformative politician and (2) praising the Reagan presidency and advocating for a return to Reaganomics? Isn’t that the kind of willfully dense president we already have in office?

Ooh gotcha. You said something that sounded positive about a Republican. Hell no. After sixteen years, does the country really need any more of that “experience”?

Last week we ran contributor JB Powell’s interview with Air America dj Thom Hartmann, who has a new book out about American political discourse called Cracking the Code. Turns out that, as part of our artful editing process, we stripped away a lot of the spiciest parts of the conversation. Why? Just because. Because of distraction and incompetence. Because “mistakes were made.” What spicy parts? you ask. Spicies like the ones in this fresh exchange:

JBP: You say that after 9-11, George W. Bush was able to get even liberals to buy into the conservative story. Do you believe it’s still a powerful enough narrative to bring another Republican into the White House?

TH: Yes I think it’s possible. Particularly if we don’t have Democrats stand up and say, “I’m not afraid anymore.” I’m still waiting for a Democrat to stand up like Franklin Roosevelt did and say, “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself and we will not be frightened.”

Other countries have been through [terrorism]. England had the IRA blowing up London for thirty years. A bomb went off on Downing Street that almost killed Margaret Thatcher. The British government didn’t say, ‘We need to do away with civil rights and habeas corpus.’ No. The British said, ‘We are not afraid. We are not fearful wimps. We will deal with this, we will conquer this, and in the meantime, we’re going to go about our lives.’ The same thing with Spain and the Basque separatists. The same thing with Germany and the Baader-Meinhof Gang. The same thing with Italy and the Red Brigades, who kidnapped Aldo Moro, the former prime minister, and killed him! And still the Italians didn’t say, ‘We need to throw [our] constitution into the waste basket.’ No, they said, ‘We’re not afraid, damn it!’

That’s just the top. The full version is posted after the jump.

In 2006, we saw Dick Cheney and the President get up and say, basically, ‘If you vote for Democrats, you’re risking a terrorist attack.’ I expect a lot worse in the upcoming 2008 election. Do you?

Absolutely. And probably in terms of world events. The Republicans are going to do everything they can, in my opinion, to increase our vulnerability to a terrorist attack. There’s considerable evidence that before the 2001 attack, whether it was intentional or not, nobody was paying attention and everybody was asleep at the switch. George Bush had over fifty different warnings that 9-11 was coming, including the famous memo [Presidential Daily Briefing] that was delivered in August.

He knew that planes could be hijacked because when he was in Italy in March of that year, he had to go sleep on an aircraft carrier, because they had specific, credible intelligence that Bin Laden himself was behind a plan to hijack an aircraft and crash it into a hotel where Bush was sleeping. So you’d think in March when that happened they would have put two and two together. But Bush had put Dick Cheney in charge of the counter-terrorism task force and that task force never even bothered to meet until September of 2001.

So 9-11 wasn’t a failure of intelligence. It was the most spectacular failure of the executive branch in our history arguably. And yet they use it to their benefit. And I suspect that they will do it again, in terms of using it to try to win elections.

It would work tremendously to the Republicans advantage if there was a terrorist attack between now and the election. And even if there’s not, I guarantee you, they’re going to be amping up the fear of terror, particularly just before the election. …It was very psychologically effective. And from a marketing point of view, it was perfect, and it was absolutely intentional.

This kind of fear mongering is so effective because in many ways, it’s self-fulfilling, isn’t it?

The conservative worldview is both a product of environment and it is also learned. The more people we have in the media and the more people in the media who benefit from the conservative worldview, the more you’re going to have the media being an instrument of teaching and training people in that worldview.

At the same time, the more conservative economics dominate the U.S., causing people to lose good union jobs and instead [forcing them] to work at Walmart for a third of the salary and none of the benefits, you find people are becoming increasingly economically insecure, which stresses out families and stresses them out, and causes them to be more vulnerable to the conservative message that the world is a terrible and dangerous place—because in fact the world has gotten more terrible and dangerous as a direct result of these conservative economic policies!

So the policies that [Ronald] Reagan put in place that have been in place for the last 30 years have by and large created a population that’s vulnerable to fear mongering. And now both the media, which benefits from the fear mongering—it’ s very profitable to have scary news, people pay attention to it—and the politicians who also benefit from fear mongering, are doing very well thank you very much.

You say that when it comes to communication, especially political communication, “feeling comes first” and that the “meaning” of anything you say comes from the response it gets, not what you intend it to mean. The Republicans and the Right seem to get this. The Democrats, not so much.

First off, the Democrats have had really stupid advisers for at least two decades. And the Republicans have some very slick professionals who understand both psychology and marketing and have been in those worlds for a long, long time.

The other problem, both at the level of party and of congress, is the fundamental psychology of conservative versus liberal. Chris Matthews likes to make the joke that about how Republicans want a leader, Democrats want to have a meeting. It’s actually true. Republicans, [who assume] that people are intrinsically evil, want to have a wise, good person take control. Democrats, believing [in] a collective wisdom, want us all to have a voice in how things are done.

What this means is that the Republican Party runs like a well-oiled machine, it really runs like a corporation. Top down, hierarchical, power driving from the top down. And when Bush talked about he was going to be the first CEO president, it made a lot of sense to Republicans. The Democratic Party on the other hand is a coalition of coalitions. Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid are herding cats. That’s the weakness of the Democratic Party, but it’s also its strength. Because it means that the institution itself is democratic, that it is reflecting the values that it seeks to uphold.

So my goal with the book is not to encourage the Democratic Party to become more like the Republican Party and become a monolithic, top down driven institution, but rather to educate and empower the many different individuals within all those different factions to be more competent with messaging.

You speak in the book about effective communication inducing a kind of trance.

If you want to teach somebody something, they have to be in a kind of trance state. And I refer to the techniques for bringing that on as “inducing the learning trance.” Mostly these [techniques] have to do with pacing and using different modalities as you speak.

The big mistake that John Kerry made against George Bush in 2004 was that he induced a boredom trance while Bush induced a feeling trance. Bush communicated feelings. They were clumsy, yes, but that [clumsiness] made it more intense, frankly. Kerry communicated ideas and concepts. But people don’t vote on ideas and concepts. They vote based on their feelings.

Ronald Reagan was pretty much the master at that [appealing to emotion] wasn’t he?

Ronald Reagan, FDR, and Jack Kennedy were three of the greatest communicators that we’ve had in the White House …What made them great was, first of all, their ability to be multimodal in their communication. They talked about their vision for America, they talked about their story of America, and they gave America a sense of what they thought it could be.

Number two, they all principally used “moving towards pleasure” strategies instead of “moving away from fear” or “pain avoidance” strategies. In other words, they held up an ideal of what we wanted to move towards as a country and made us proud of ourselves.

Number three, they communicated emotion and always used story and emotion to pass along information.

You point out how Reagan actually picked up one of Kennedy’s themes, which Kennedy himself picked up from John Winthrop – The “America as a city on a hill” theme, except Reagan inserted a key word into its phrasing, didn’t he?

Yes, “shining.” He dramatically improved the “America as a city on the hill” metaphor by making us a “shining” city on a hill. He put that word in and it gave the image even more power.

What’s interesting is …Reagan’s notion of America as the city on the hill was very different than Kennedy’s. John Kennedy’s idea of the city on a hill was that the entire world is looking at [America] and every single one of us in the country is the city. From the highest and best to the poorest economically, we are all part of that city on the hill and we welcome people in to participate in it. Reagan on the other hand, his version of the city on the hill was, we’re the castle, we’re the fortress, we’re the place where Cinderella the lowly commoner hopes one day to get in and dance with the prince.

In the current crop of Presidential aspirants right now, who stands out in terms of communication skills?

John Edwards is a brilliant communicator. Barrack Obama is a brilliant communicator. I think Edwards has the potential to be the next FDR and I think Barrack has the chance to be the next John Kennedy.

I read that you campaigned for Barry Goldwater in your youth…

When I was 13 years old, my dad was active in the local Republican Party and I went door to door with him. I read [Goldwater’s] autobiography Conscience of a Conservative …I even went to a John Birch Society meeting. I was convinced that the communists had infiltrated the State Department and they were coming to get us. But within two years, I had completely shaken myself out of that trance. There’s nothing like growing up, going off to college and discovering that you’re of draft age and your government wants to kill you. Not to mention being exposed to ideas beyond what I had learned up to that point [like] the core concepts of the enlightenment.

So you heard a different “story.”

Exactly, and I lived a different story. I really saw America differently the first time one of my friends came back in a box from Vietnam.

My mother is a big fan of your radio show. But she lives in San Diego and the Air America affiliate there is either going off the air or has already gone off the air.

It went off the air last week, actually.

Can you talk about the future of progressive media in light of those kinds of setbacks?

The first two or three years that conservative talk radio was on the air, it struggled terribly. And then it reached the point where advertisers realized they were getting results and program directors realized that they had a core listenership and it started to take off. And it’s been about 20 years that conservative talk radio has been around, so no matter how outrageous Michael Savage might get, people just shrug and go, ‘Well that’s just normal stuff.’

I think we’re now into three or four years of progressive talk radio being visible to America. I’ve been doing my show for six years now, but we’re at about three years of it being obvious. And many markets are doing well. Here in Portland, for example, where I’m live, the local Clear Channel station that puts us on is a 25 thousand watt station and they’ve got professional management and a good sales team. And it’s been profitable since day one. They’re making money because they treat it like a real format and they give it a good signal. Those stations around the country that are doing that are having tremendous success. The stations where they put it on the weakest signal they’ve got, the ones who have the same guys selling ads for liberal talk radio who also sell for conservative talk radio, who’ve spent 20 years getting to know the local conservative committee and who show up at the local Republican Party meetings to meet advertisers, those guys aren’t going to market progressive talk radio very well.

So in the next year or few years, there’s going to be a broad perception across radio-dom, that beyond the ongoing feast and famine of Air America, liberal talk radio is here to stay. That the format works. That the talent works, that shows are able to capture a large audience and hold it over a long period of time. When that mentality shift happens in the world of the average program director, we’ll be there. Right now, you know the conventional wisdom is, ‘nobody ever got fired for putting Rush Limbaugh on the air.’ When the conventional wisdom becomes, ‘nobody ever got fired for putting Thom Hartmann on the air,’ then everything will change and I think we’re very close to that.

In 1979, according to history books and some of the people who were alive back then, Ronald Reagan, with that folksy Hollywood brand he had going, somehow convinced working class Americans that the Republican party was looking out for their interests as well as the interests of their millionaire bosses. Suddenly the guys who owned and ran the factories with their suits and power ties and the guys and gals who filed into them every day with their lunchboxes and hard hats were all on the same team: everybody was Reagan Republicans, cuz it was morning in America and he was good looking and patriotic and he slashed taxes and corporate oversight and busted unions and all the factories closed down and moved away and now we alls work at Wal-Mart.

That’s one version of the story, anyway. Barack Obama makes quick unarticulated reference to that history in this ad. Obama may be the anti-Reagan, opposite in every way, but similarly able to redefine the debate and maybe win back the people that got fooled in that long long ago.