Dan Boren is a Democrat who knows how to win in a conservative district. In three tries for Congress, he has never had a close race - exceeding 70 percent in each of his last two elections. He’s taken advantage of a famous name to make his GOP-leaning seat relatively safe from challengers.

It’s interesting to see how far Boren will go to try to preserve his image as someone acceptable to conservatives:

Ten feet from the desk, in the main hallway of Boren’s new Durant headquarters, the congressman beams from a portrait, his arm draped around President George W. Bush. A photo with the current president is nowhere to be found.

“Barack Obama is very unpopular,” said Boren, who represents Oklahoma’s 2nd Congressional District. “He got 34 percent of the vote statewide, and less in our district. If he were to run for re-election today, I bet it would be even worse.”

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According to Gallup, despite the election of Barack Obama and the Democratic strength in Congress (or because of it), Americans say they are becoming more conservative. For those who may not have realized it, this again emphasizes the importance to Republicans of restoring their credibility as the party of conservatism. While the mainstream media continues to ask how Republicans will moderate their views to compete more effectively, the reality is that they need to demonstrate that they believe what they say about limited government, personal responsibility, and a strong national defense.

Despite the results of the 2008 presidential election, Americans, by a 2-to-1 margin, say their political views in recent years have become more conservative rather than more liberal, 39% to 18%, with 42% saying they have not changed. While independents and Democrats most often say their views haven’t changed, more members of all three major partisan groups indicate that their views have shifted to the right rather than to the left…

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I think not:

In early October, as the meltdown of the financial industry gained momentum following the collapse of Lehman Brothers, a Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey found that 59% of U.S. voters agreed with Ronald Reagan that “government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.”

Since then, the stock markethas fallen roughly 3,000 points, millions of jobs have been lost, nearly a trillion dollars has been spent so far to bail out the financial industry, an additional $787-billion government stimulus package has been approved, and a new president has taken office who has proposed spending billions and billions more.

Despite all that, a new Rasmussen Reports telephone survey shows that the basic views of the American people have not change: 59% of voters still agree with Reagan’s inaugural address statement. Only 28% disagree, and 14% are not sure.

I have to think that all of this could pay dividends for Republicans if the GOP can win the public relations war over the size of the Obama stimulus package, the budget, the deficits the Administration is running up, the taxes they want to raise, and the way in which the Administration is working to bring back the era of Big Government. Ecstasies over a New New Deal notwithstanding, the public is not in the mood for bigger government and can be persuaded to give a big thumbs-down to the Administration’s efforts to expand government if only White House spin is not allowed to trump the facts of the Administration’s domestic program.

It may be Barack Obama’s White House. But it is still Ronald Reagan’s America. If the latter sees clearly that the Administration’s policy priorities are antithetical to its own, we will look back on talk of the GOP’s decline and laugh.