Stuart to GOP: swing right

"Reinvent Republicanism!" says Ross Douthat.

"Purge the idolators!" says Rush Limbaugh.

"What, us worry?" says Clark County's own Ryan Hart.

Here's a guy with some unexpected advice for the GOP: Democratic Commissioner Steve Stuart.

"Honestly, I think they need to rediscover their conservatism," Stuart said Wednesday.

The county commissioner, whose girlfriend Heather Melton managed Democrat Peter Goldmark's upset victory in the public lands commissioner race, was headed back from an event with Goldmark up north, listening to Air America in the car, as he often does.

And thinking about what the Republican Party needs.

"I actually share a lot of their beliefs, their conservative beliefs of economics and keeping government out of the way of people," Stuart said. "But what we have had with the neoconservatives is … bigger government. We've had more intrusion, we've had bigger deficits and all of these things that are not conservative values."

After all, Stuart, 37, came of age under Ronald Reagan.

"Where they have been most successful is when they have been able to speak to people about individual and government freedom," he said. "There's a reason there were Reagan Democrats."

michael.andersen@columbian.com