The prospect of a genuine strategic rethink by Virginia Republicans lasted about two hours, before the off base exit polls gave way to a far narrower than expected loss by Ken Cuccinelli—the kind of “might have been” that provokes more rationalizations than insights. Perhaps predictably, I am in the camp that thinks a game plan of squeezing every last drop out of the political base with no credible appeal to the center, and abandoning state issues in the quest for a referendum on national healthcare policy, was actually lucky to hit 46 percent of the vote (and required a final week of Democratic coasting to get that close).

Because the first part of that formulation has been analyzed to death, I’ll dwell on the second part: the curiosity that the famously articulate Cuccinelli never defined on his own terms why his unfettered conservatism was a virtue. In the perverse way that opposites tend to resemble each other, Cuccinelli’s campaign actually mimicked his Democratic opponent, Terry McAuliffe , by avoiding any discussion of much of the policy landscape that will surface on the next governor’s desk: neither nominee got around to addressing the decision by the state’s flagship university to downscale its tuition assistance plan for low income students; both offered weak and shifting positions on the nature of the state’s energy production future; neither spoke to the question of whether federally adopted Common Core standards ought to be adopted in local school districts; and the subject of whether Virginia will move toward softer or tougher standards for unemployment assistance never came up. The unresolved dilemma of what or who will make up the difference if the federal internet sales tax proposals that are intended to finance a chunk of Virginia’s new transportation plan never materialize? It’s a wide open guess that neither would-be governor got around to mentioning.

The one state level issue that was debated in the race that just ended was, of course, whether Virginia should accept federal expansion of its Medicaid program. But “debated” is a relative term, given that Cuccinelli framed the subject almost exclusively as one of whether Virginia should embrace the Affordable Care Act writ large and McAuliffe’s advocacy for expansion never made its way into a single one of about 35 iterations of his statewide ad buy.

McAuliffe’s contribution to the substance free nature of the race at least made political sense: in focusing on Cuccinelli’s hard edged positions, McAuliffe made the point that his opponent’s governorship might pursue its share of distractions and that coalition building was not exactly a dominant part of Cuccinelli’s history. Fair or not, complete or not, that is at least an accounting of the risks in right-wing leadership, and McAuliffe’s shortchanging of specifics was a necessary concession to his own thin public record and his penchant for superficiality over fine print.

In contrast, a Republican candidate with a reputation for smarts and fluency in defending his views left his agenda so vague, so insubstantial that McAuliffe’s parody of those same views was all but uncontested–unless an undecided voter or a moderate Democrat was persuaded that the kind of man who is “attentive to details and serious” (one stunningly bland GOP ad) and who labored to overturn a wrongful conviction (another Cuccinelli spot that got lost in its own weeds) couldn’t possibly wage a crusade against birth control).

My own guess is that Cuccinelli’s advisors concluded that the social issue terrain was too unwinnable to defend and that a counter-attack on McAuliffe for, say, favoring late trimester abortions offered more risk than reward. (and presumably, that reminding voters of Cuccinellii’s principled opposition to mandatory ultrasound exams in advance of abortions would only dampen the fervor of the pro life grassroots who had been career long allies). It is also true that Cuccinelli took a stab at some of the themes that are at the essence of conservative reform—like middle income tax relief and expanding charter schools and parental choice in school district assignments. But the reform bent of his candidacy was overwhelmed by the exponentially greater advertising dollars and rhetorical energy attacking McAuliffe on ethics and investments; and on the related bet that “McAuliffe, the flashy wheeler dealer” would prove more off-putting than “Cuccinelli the extremist.”

It’s telling that a Republican who extols the benefit of state government at the expense of federal power offered such a scattered narrative about what conservative state governance would actually look like. Its telling and depressing that Team Cuccinelli assumed that the substance of a conservative policy platform wouldn’t provide the potential of both energizing his base and co-opting independents. It’s not only the center that seems to lack confidence in its persuasive powers.

In one rosy scenario, the self destructive streak of Ted Cruz and House Republicans burns out without a default, with Barack Obama incurring his share of the national disgust, and with the public’s frustration over the Affordable Care Act eventually cancelling out memories of the shutdown itself. And in that same optimal place, Republicans absorb their lessons with something like the synthesis that Ross Douthat writes about in his Sunday column:

“..Republicans need to seek a kind of integration, which embraces the positive aspects of the new populism—its hostility to K Street and Wall Street, its relative openness to policy innovation, its desire to speak on behalf of Middle America and the middle class—while tempering its [nihilistic] streak with prudence, realism, and savoir-fare.”

As good as Douthat has been in outlining during the last few weeks why the shutdown strategy is painfully flawed, from even a right-leaning perspective, he is engaging in his own bit of wishful thinking about the lines of a Republican comeback and its worth taking some space to say why. First, as I suggested in my last column, the shutdown is best understood not as some bridge too far from the populism he describes but a pretty natural outgrowth of it. The reality is that the right’s populism has had a consistent unifying principle since the spring of 2009: it is that the federal government is posing an unprecedented threat to liberty, and that it presents an existential danger to a particular ideal of American society. That apocalyptic claim has played out in any number of contexts, from suspicions about Barack Obama’s citizenship, to cries of socialized medicine, to the painting of liberalism as a subversive scheme. It’s not the sort of rhetorical tendency that distinguishes between programs based on their relative effectiveness or which weeds out obtainable goals from unrealistic ones. It’s absolutely a worldview that has made any approach to Obamacare other than all out obstruction or resistance seem like unprincipled softness.

Is there a middle class friendly legislative vision waiting to burst of all that anti government zeal? Not so far at the grassroots level, and not inside the rarified air of various conservative conferences. And as Bobby Jindal’s swift fade from prominence since last winter, and Marco Rubio’s slippage from “can’t miss” status to the mid tier of 2016 contenders indicate, the more potent currency in conservative settings has not been an appeal to more policy creativity or substantive rebranding on issues like immigration, but the fundamentalism offered by Rand Paul and Ted Cruz: and as Douthat himself has pointed out, their message is either decidedly vague on details (Cruz) or a rehash of conventional top heavy tax cut plans that shortchange the middle class (Paul).

The “integration” between populism and reform that Douthat pines for is not a fantasy: the conservative populism of the Obama era has opened a window to the alienation downscale whites felt through the last decade of American politics, when Bush Republicans seemed indifferent to wage stagnation and Obama Democrats seemed incapable of reversing the erosion of working class security. But the right’s most conspicuous rising stars have expended virtually no capital on building or selling any type of actual policy framework to activists: even a conservative with an authentic record of engaging topics like inner city poverty and educational inequality, Ben Carson, has seen fit to downplay that history in favor of diatribes equating slavery with Obamacare.

I’ve written that the populist right’s tilt toward radicalism isn’t likely to be self-correcting and requires a much more forceful counter-argument from the center right. And unlike Douthat, I have become skeptical that it is a simple matter of a candidate with “movement credibility” combining the right’s passions with a more tenable market oriented reform vision. The more plausible fact may well be that a reform vision is temperamentally and substantively at odds with right wing populism’s intense distrust of public institutions. Breaking through that tension might not be a pipe dream, but it is hard to imagine without a sustained case about what public (and conservative) purposes can legitimately be accomplished through government.

And without question, the kind of accommodation and outreach that builds coalitions is discredited when conflict has been over-dramatized into a clash between freedom and darker impulses. Is the antidote what Douthat describes as declaring war on the GOP base? Not at all, but given the base’s demonstrated inability to strengthen the party’s electability, there is a distinct need to challenge that base’s grip on the meaning of conservatism and its monopoly on defining legitimacy within the party. I’ve come to the mindset that the challenge will require more toughness than politeness.