COMING TO TERMS: In the months ahead, the right is going to have to choose between the adolescent triumphalism of Jonah Goldberg (pictured) and the searching introspection of William F. Buckley Jr. Both men are affiliated with the National Review.

Not everyone on the right has been so accommodating, however. Reactions to the recent Republican setbacks have varied sharply among the conservative journalistic brain trust, ranging from the chagrined (we got our asses kicked, and rightly so) to the flippant (what, us worry?). And among those conservatives who are taking the outcome hard, there’s disagreement about what exactly went wrong. Here’s how the discussion is breaking down — and what it portends for the future of the GOP.

Woe is us
One of the more sober post-election assessments came from Weekly Standard executive editor Fred Barnes. “This one is pretty easy to explain,” Barnes wrote. “Republicans lost the House and probably the Senate because of Iraq, corruption, and a record of taking up big issues and doing nothing about them.” Such as? Immigration (Barnes is pro-amnesty), Social Security reform, earmark abuse. Notably, Barnes’s wrath is directly squarely at Congress: while he pegs Iraq as “by far the biggest factor” in the midterm elections, he’s got zilch to say about the president’s handling of the war. (In fact, he even praises Bush for “courageously propos[ing] and campaign[ing] for Social Security reform in 2005.”) Why the soft touch? I’m guessing it’s because Barnes’s hymn to Bush — Rebel-in-Chief: Inside the Bold and Controversial Presidency of George W. Bush — recently went paperback. But that’s just a theory.

Barnes also gives Democrats a modicum of credit, praising Rahm Emanuel — the Illinois congressman who ran the party’s congressional campaign — for recruiting a good slate of candidates. Finally, and most important, Barnes warns that the midterms bode poorly for the GOP’s long-term prospects. Not only are the Democrats getting stronger in the Northeast, he observes; they’ve also turned Colorado, Arizona, and Virginia into battleground states that will be up for grabs in the 2008 presidential race. His bottom line: “The defeat for Republicans was short of devastating — but only a little short.”

Conservative titan William F. Buckley Jr. is less gloomy than Barnes, but not by much. After lamenting, in characteristically lyrical manner, the conservative casualties of ’06 (“tenacity and right mindedness, in the case of Rick Santorum. Geniality of intellect and an aura of idealism-in-hand, in the case of Jim Talent”), Buckley briefly finds momentary consolation in the rhythms of history. In the sixth year of most presidencies, he observes, the president’s party tends to take a major hit. (Like most conservative commentators, Buckley fails to note that this didn’t happen to Bill Clinton.)

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Still, this observation doesn’t cloud Buckley’s critical faculties — and it’s Bush, not Congress, who pays the price. Bush’s pre-election attempts to lampoon the Democrats for having no Iraq plan rang hollow because Bush didn’t have one, either: as Buckley puts it, “Mr. Bush has no ‘plan’ other than a projection of the same plan that has failed.” What’s more, Bush is blameworthy because he’s never used his veto to check Congress’s profligate spending, didn’t make a serious effort on immigration, and “simply gave up” on Social Security reform. Right now, Buckley concludes, the GOP’s claim to be the party of good government isn’t all that convincing.

All talk, no reflection
And then there’s Jonah Goldberg — who, despite being a National Review colleague of Buckley’s (he’s editor-at-large of National Review Online), is best known as the son of Lucianne, who’s best known for telling Linda Tripp to tape her chats with Monica Lewinsky. Chalk it up to his age (he’s 37) or his Ann Coulter–esque understanding of American politics (he’s the author of the forthcoming Liberal Fascism: the Totalitarian Temptation from Mussolini to Hillary Clinton), but Goldberg’s assessment of what happened last week is callow and unreflective. Writing in USA Today, Goldberg takes great comfort in sixth-year-itis: since the average president sees his party lose 34 House and seven Senate seats in year six, he reports happily, the Dems actually underperformed! (Again, no mention of Clinton.)

Goldberg’s central mission, though, is rebutting the argument that the midterms were a defeat for conservatism — a task made significantly easier by the fact that no one is actually making that argument in the first place. His key evidence? Joe Lieberman is pretty conservative; so is Jim Webb, who beat Republican incumbent George Allen in the Virginia Senate race; so is Bob Casey, who beat Republican senator Rick Santorum in Pennsylvania. Goldberg does feint briefly toward self-criticism, but quickly sprints in the opposite direction. “The GOP got thrown out of office because it got fat and lazy [no examples, sorry] and because Democrats — with the help of a transmission-belt media — convinced a lot of voters they could simply change the channel on the war by voting for ‘change.’ ” Liberal media, cut-and-run — really, there’s nothing new here.