What I think of the Bush administration, part 2

Brad DeLong asks the question I have asked many times since 1995: Where are the grownups in the Republican Party?

I recently read Henry Fairlie's 1978 book, The parties: Republicans and Democrats in this century, and Fairlie agrees with Hubert Humphrey that

[pgs. 215-16]

(Again, that was in 1978, before the Reagan wing, with its slogan of "Government is not the solution to our problem, government is the problem", took over.)

So I wonder (as does Fairlie) if a main reason for the many mediocre or failed Republican presidencies of the last 100 years — Taft, Harding, Coolidge, Hoover, Nixon, Ford, Bush 41, Bush 43 — is that Republicans since Theodore Roosevelt have had such contempt for government that they have never learned (and don't see a point to learning) how to govern?

Or, as an alternate explanation, I wonder whether Republicans govern so poorly because the agencies and aims of the federal government have been created and determined almost exclusively by Democrats during the past 70 years?