But will the Right scurry away from it?

Sullivan makes a lot of sense in The Center Moves Left?, in which he explains how the Obama administration is responding to actual events, not attempting to recreate France or form a socialist republic:

If your goal is to keep a polity in one piece during an economic crisis, raising some taxes on those who have had a relatively low-tax couple of decades, is again pragmatically defensible. If I thought Obama's goal was to redistribute for the sake of it, I'd be appalled. But that isn't what he's said and it isn't what he believes. Ditto cap-and-trade. I don't think it's the best way to tackle climate change, but I do see it as a legitimate, practical response to climate change - not some expansion of government for its own sake. It's also a real, if flawed, attempt to wean us off oil after a decade in which we learned the hard way what oil-fueled fanaticism can do to us. Again: this is about reacting to changes in the world. It seems to me to be within the conservative mindset to adjust to practical necessity and a changing world.

Once again, we have the curious attempt of Andrew Sullivan to reserve the "conservative" label for the things he believes, despite any evidence that modern American conservatism is anything like that.  I admire the effort, but I think Sullivan's going to have to change his moniker, because the Palin/Jindal Republican Party ain't a gonna.

But his point is spot on: we have massive problems like the economy, climate change, and health care, and the Republicans have been given every opportunity to do something about them, and they haven't made an iota of progress.

Now the Democrats are having their turn, and, while I don't buy into every last piece of it, I sure know what doesn't work.  So let's be cautious, see what happens, and try to respond a lot more quickly than we've seen in this last torpid 28 years.