Finally, Republicans Are Being Republicans Again

Republicans should be happy with this week's debate for two reasons, writes Peggy Noonan in the Wall Street Journal. First, nobody showed up from "Crazytown." More importantly, the candidates demonstrated a "new sobriety" on foreign policy. "There were no burly promises of victories around the corner and lights at the ends of tunnels," she writes. "It was more muted than that, more realistic, different in tone and tenor from four and eight years ago."

The candidates want us out of Afghanistan and Libya, and "all of this had the sound of the Republican Party inching its way back from 10 years of un-Republican behavior, from a kind of bullying dreaminess about the world." She is pleased to "see the Republicans start to return to themselves, to their essential nature as a party, which was invented to be genially sober, like Lincoln, optimistic but not unrealistic, like Reagan, and accepting that life has limits and it's not unpatriotic to say so." One of those limits: We're broke, and we can't afford to fight the 10-year Afghan war anymore. (More Republicans stories.)