OUR OPINiON :The GOP's Achilles heel

Why might Democrats lose the presidency next year?

That's easy: Because of the economy. If unemployment had dropped to 6 percent by now and the economy still was accelerating, Barack Obama would be looking at winning 40 states.

Of course, that's not what the economy is doing at all. But while Obama's prospects are seriously threatened, no Republican candidate is a shoo-in. The race remains something of a tossup.

Why?

Given the sour economy, why might the GOP lose?

That's easy, too.

The answer is fear: fear of the prospects of hard-right reforms -- namely, the dismantling of the welfare state.

Americans want a safety net, one with more breadth and strength than charities can provide.

Obama recognizes these fears and intends to campaign hard on them. He made that plain Tuesday in his speech in Kansas.

Conservative Republicans' "philosophy is simple," the president said.

"We are better off when everybody is left to fend for themselves and play by their own rules. ... We simply cannot return to this brand of 'you're on your own' economics if we're serious about rebuilding the middle class in this country."

Former labor secretary Robert Reich is blunter in his description: The America the conservatives seek "is the one we had in the Gilded Age of the late nineteenth century," Reich wrote earlier this month.

It was an era in which "the gap between rich and poor had turned into a chasm; urban slums festered; ... and the lackeys of rich literally deposited sacks of money on desks of pliant legislators."

If Republicans want to win the 2012 elections, they're going to have explain why Obama and Reich are wrong.

Can they do so? Of course they can. But first, they'll have to accept a key Democratic talking point.

Because in order to avoid Reich's Gilded Age -- in order to avoid the return of pre-New Deal institutions such as poor farms and child labor, which Newt Gingrich astonishingly has called for -- they're going to have accept the need for a welfare state.

A better-run, more efficient and less expensive welfare state, no doubt. But a welfare state nevertheless.

Americans tried the alternative, exactly as Reich described. And they didn't like the way it turned out.

Some solid conservatives already are there. "The welfare state, or entitlement state, is here to stay," writes Steven Hayward, an American Enterprise Institute scholar and contributor to the conservative "Power Line" blog, in a recent essay.

"It is a central feature of modernity itself. We are simply not going back to a system of 'rugged individualism' in a minimalist 'night watchman' state; there is not even a plurality in favor of this position."

Hayward cites others who've acknowledged this truth. Here's Irving Kristol, the "godfather of neoconservatism," in 1993: "The welfare state is with us, for better or worse, and conservatives should try to make it better rather than worse."

Here's Ramesh Ponnuru of National Review in 2006: "There is no imaginable political coalition in America capable of sustaining a majority that takes a reduction of the scope of the federal government as one of its central tasks."

Here's Tyler Cowen, a libertarian economist: "The welfare state is here to stay, whether we like it or not."

But as Hayward notes, "this perception has not penetrated the activist ranks."

It should. Because without it, Republicans can't win national elections.

Former President George W. Bush understood this, and it helped him win two terms. Bush's "compassionate conservatism" was an express acknowledgement that Americans want well-run social-insurance plans.

True, the GOP electorate is more conservative than it was then. But while tea party conservatives won GOP-leaning House districts in 2010, they lost their key Senate races, in part because the candidates' ideology turned off independents.

"What kind of society, exactly, do modern Republicans want?"

Reich asked that question in his essay, then answered it by describing a society in which only the fittest survive.

How is he wrong? The election may turn on whether Republicans answer that question. Candidates should take the time to do so, lest they be portrayed as Social Darwinist architects of a not-so-Gilded Age.