owen over at Bayosphere says something very nicely that I've been thinking. The comment is longer but the last paragraph is quite important:

The black holes of Nixon's psyche have become modern Republican policy. Ike and Barry Goldwater must be pirouetting in their tombs over the loss of what was once a finely developed civic conscience. How sad that the legacy of Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt, of Eisenhower and Goldwater, Rockefeller, Lodge, Taft and so many other honorable Republicans of many philosophies has been erased.