The lesson they taught was that you don't win elections by saying "me too," and trying to substitute a Republican version of big-government, wild-spending quasi-socialist agenda for a Democrat big-government, wild-spending quasi-socialist agenda.

Democrats know how to be socialists, Republicans don't. They can only try to imitate the real thing, so you end up as Benito Mussolini, half-socialist and half-capitalist, and not as Joe Stalin, socialist all the way to the death camps of Siberia.

If the GOP listeners want to know what the conservative majority among voters want and are thinking about, all they need to do is listen to Rush Limbaugh, Sarah Palin, Sean Hannity, Mark Levin, and -- in all modesty -- Mike Reagan.

Our voices are the voice of the majority of Republican voters and open-minded independents. We don't have tens of millions of listeners every day because we have a message that contradicts the opinion of our audience -- we have such a vast army of listeners because they recognize that we are echoing their own opinions and telling them they are right in thinking as they do.

They recognize gimmicky when they see it. Watching TV this morning, I saw a pornography star who is running for the United States Senate announcing that she is on -- guess what -- a "listening tour," to learn if voters want her to make the run for Capitol Hill. It seems Republicans aren't the only ones using gimmickry these days.

If Republicans had really been listening, they'd still be in control of the House and Senate and there would be a Republican in the White House.

They didn't listen then, and they aren't listening now. If they start listening, what they'll hear is a demand that the Republican Party get back to the principles and beliefs embodied by Ronald Reagan, and get back to the principles of genuine conservatism which echo Thomas Jefferson's sage advice that a people who fear government cannot be free, but a government that fears the people is a government where the people are the masters and the state is their servant.

Finally, it isn't nostalgia for the Reagan era we need to forget, but the big government, wild-spending of Jeb Bush's brother George's administration.