Over the course of the last couple of weeks, two very important developments have taken place in American politics that most pundits have missed but that suggest that undercurrents are moving in a direction that will lead to a Republican resurgence and a Democratic downfall in the coming election cycles. The first is that Republicans have gotten serious about governing again, and the second is that Democrats have gotten serious about leftism again. Both of these developments are likely to swing independents and centrists back to the GOP and re-orient a center-right country back around its right-of-center political party.

Because there are more conservatives and moderates than liberals in America, the median American voter — the voter at the fifty yard line of the overall electorate — is a right-leaning centrist. Given that ideological breakdown, there is no good reason for the nation’s left-of-center political party to control both the White House and sixty percent of the national legislative body. A center-right country shouldn’t be electing a center-left government unless something is very wrong on both sides of the aisle. And until recently, something has been very wrong.

On the Republican side, the post-Bush GOP has been divided between big-government conservatives and no-government conservatives. The Bush Establishment’s liberalization of the GOP — turning it into a big-spending, bossy party with a small-l liberal foreign policy — caused conservatives to lose their mojo. Conservatives, convinced that the act of governing was inherently liberal after seeing what Bush had done, have spent the last year or so basically sitting out the debate over the issues, taking shots at anyone trying to tackle the issues that people care about and responding to public problems with slogans, such as “America has the finest health care system in the world,” rather than with solutions. This left those of us interested in actually governing, but opposed to the standard-issue Democratic domestic agenda, looking for allies in liberal Republicans like the Bushies and conservative Democrats like Max Baucus. That’s because they were the only ones offering halfway reasonable, if highly flawed, solutions to America’s problems.

But in the last few weeks, a couple of interesting things happened. The first was the victories in Virginia and New Jersey by conservatives interested in governance, running on conservative solutions to the issues that voters cared about. The second was the release of a GOP health care plan that actually solves most of the nation’s health care problems without breaking the bank or taking away too much freedom.

The Republican health care plan put forth by the GOP congressional caucus would tackle the problem with health care by passing a few small-bore reforms that would gradually bring down the cost of health care and help more people get insured. The plan would institute high-risk pools to ensure that the uninsurable are able to pool risk amongst themselves and thus get insured, all without instituting guaranteed issue or an individual mandate, both of which would raise premiums for everyone. It would also prevent insurance companies from rescinding policies when individuals get sick. It would allow young Americans to stay on their parents’ health plan up until age 25, a smart policy in a society where more and more Americans are choosing to obtain graduate, post-graduate, and professional degrees in order to keep up with the demands of the economy, something that government should encourage in order to ensure that our workforce can continue to compete with the rising economic powers of China and India. And it includes measures like tort reform and the ability to shop for insurance across state lines that will bring down the cost of health care and health insurance over time.

Critics respond that the GOP plan does little for the vast majority of the uninsured, most of whom are uninsured because they are unable to afford to purchase a plan. While it’s true that the GOP plan would take care of this issue over time by lowering the cost of health care, it’s also true that such a policy does little to help working class folks who need health insurance now, and who aren’t content to wait ten years for market forces to take hold. That’s why I would prefer to combine this plan with another Republican plan, the one proposed by John McCain during the 2008 election. McCain’s plan would have extended a refundable tax credit to all individuals towards the purchase of a health plan, which would have been paid for by ending the tax advantage given to employer-based health care. While this isn’t a perfect plan, it is a solid conservative solution that expands individual choice by simply refusing to use the tax code to prefer Americans who receive health insurance through their employer over Americans who purchase health insurance on the market. The current tax code rewards the GM employee at the expense of the entrepreneur who is building the next GM. Ending that tax advantage in order to incentivize entrepreneurship and to make it easier for people to take responsibility for their own lives by purchasing insurance on the market was a good idea in 2008 and is still a good idea, and if McCain had known how to sell it he might be president today.

The current GOP health plan combined with the plan proposed by the last Republican presidential ticket takes care of the vast majority of our nation’s health care problems at a fraction of the cost of any of the Democratic plans being proposed. Unlike BaucusCare, it doesn’t destroy the health insurance market, it doesn’t force anyone to purchase a product, it puts few new regulations on insurance companies, and it doesn’t come with the myriad of unintended consequences that any sort of seismic re-organization of the health care industry is sure to bring about. And the GOP solutions are eons better than PelosiCare, an example of the worst excesses of leftism, which will throw Americans in jail for being unable or unwilling to purchase a product and which will bust the budget and create a new middle class entitlement that will probably work about as well as all of the existing ones.

I’m fairly certain that, given the choice between PelosiCare, BaucusCare, and a comprehensive Republican plan containing all of the good ideas put forth by the GOP over the past year or so on this issue, most Americans would choose the Republican plan. That’s because the GOP plans described above are the least intrusive, the cheapest, and solve the actual problems that exist in our health care system and not the ideological ones, tackling the cost of health care and the uninsured rather than attempting to remake the entire system in a European image. That aforementioned right-leaning centrist voter at the fifty yard line of American politics would certainly prefer these solutions to PelosiCare and probably also to BaucusCare. When that voter has to choose between bad ideas and no ideas, bad ideas will win every time. But when Republicans actually get serious about tackling the issues, and come up with solutions to public problems, they actually do pretty well at it. Maybe they should try to do so more often.