I don’t think Bill Clinton and the Democrats are going to get very far with this meme.

DES MOINES, Iowa (Reuters) - Former President Bill Clinton told Iowa’s Democratic Party faithful on Saturday that the actions of “an extreme sliver” of the Republican Party have backfired and “profoundly divided” the country.

“We’ve got a big responsibility. Forget about 2008. Forget about the politics. Just go out and find somebody and look them dead in the eye and say ‘You know, this is not right’...This is America,” Clinton said. “We can do better and this year, it’s a job that Democrats have to do alone.”

More than 3,500 Iowa Democrats paid $100 each to attend the fund-raising banquet that kicked off with Clinton’s speech. About 50 people paid $10,000 per couple to attend a private reception with Clinton beforehand.

Republicans, who control the White House and Congress, Clinton charged “paint themselves as pure and the rest of us who don’t agree with them as stained” in order to divide the country and stay in power.

“People know things are out of whack, that fundamentally the order of, the rhythm of public life and our common life as Americans has been severely disturbed,” he said. . . .

“You cannot blame the entire Republican party for this reason. The entire government of the United States, the Congress, the White House and increasingly the courts for the last six years has been in the total control not of the Republican party but of the most ideological, the most right wing, the most extreme sliver of the Republican Party.”

What Clinton is obviously trying to do here is paint the publics’ current dissatisfaction with Republicans as dissatisfaction with the conservative ideology in general.  While that would be convenient for Clinton and his fellow liberal Democrats, the facts simply don’t support this premise.

Recently Glenn Reynolds published this list of Republican miscues that have landed them in the electoral mess they’re in now:

1. The Terri Schiavo affair: The bitterness it aroused, which was substantial, opened a fracture in the GOP coalition: Social-conservatives against the rest. And as I noted at the time, the social conservatives were pretty nasty to the rest. No, it wasn’t really a case of “theocracy” at work, as people like Ralph Nader agreed with the social conservatives. But the haste to enact federal legislation over a matter of state law, and the mean-spiritedness with which those who disagreed were treated, did the Bush coalition no good. What’s more, as I noted at the time (see first link above), this wasn’t enough to make the social conservatives happy anyway. Politically, I think this marked the beginning of the end.

2. The Harriet Miers debacle: Plenty of warning in the blogs that this was a big mistake, but all ignored by the White House and Congressional leadership. Social conservatives were mad here, and so was anyone who cared about the credentials of nominees. The nomination was withdrawn, but the damage was done.

3. The Dubai Ports disaster: Here I think that the Administration was on defensible ground from a policy perspective, but its ham-handed approach—once again ignoring early warnings from the blogs—turned it into a mess, and cost it major credibility with its national security constituency. The Administraiton was bumbling and inept in addressing this matter, which gained currency because of its flaccid stance on the cartoon Jihad. The consequence: Lost faith from its strongest constituency.

4. Immigration: Another unforced error. The national security constituency once again lost faith in the Administration. You can’t talk about secure borders when the borders are porous. The Administration also failed to make a strong clear argument for immigration, outsourcing that to the Wall Street Journal, which did its best but couldn’t do the President’s job. Again, the White House’s position on immigration was defensible in the abstract, but favoring easy immigration is one thing, favoring easy illegal immigration is another.

5. William Jefferson: A Democratic Congressman is caught in a bribery scandal with a freezer full of cash, and Dennis Hastert backs him up, making clear that protection of insider privilege is more important to the Republican leadership in Congress than either party or principle. The White House, at least, intervened here, eventually. Add to this the GOP leadership’s failure to follow through on promised ethics reforms, and its addiction to pork-barrel spending, and you’ve got lots of reason to think that they don’t stand for anything except stuffing their pockets.

6. Foleygate: Not much of a scandal in itself, but the last straw for a lot of people. As Rich Lowry noted, a long chain of missteps and self-serving actions has exhausted their stock of moral and political capital, leaving them vulnerable to, well, almost anything. This was probably enough.

While I’d add the Abramoff debacle, along with the unconstitutional campaign finance reform legislation and the prescription drug entitlement Bush signed into law, to this list I think most of us can agree that this is a fairly exhaustive run-down of what Republicans have done to tick off voters.  But one thing to notice about this list is that not one item on it represents a failure of conservative (what Bill Clinton and his fellow Democrats would call “extremist") policies.  All of the items on this list represent either political ineptness or corruption, but not one of them represent the failure of conservative ideology applied to a given issue.

Bill Clinton, Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi and all the rest of the Democrats can rail all they want against “extremist” Republicans, but the fact of the matter is that voters aren’t upset about “extremist” conservative politics.  They’re upset at Republicans too distracted by controversy and stupid politics to advance the conservative principles they were put in office to advance.

I’ve said many times before on this blog that if Republicans lose in November it will be because they have shot themselves in the foot, not because Americans are rejecting conservative principles and turning toward liberalism.  The voters still support what Republicans are supposed to stand for, they’re just disgusted that the current crop of Republicans in power haven’t been delivering it.  While that may get Democrats into office by default, it certainly isn’t illustrative of the idea that Democrats have earned their way into office by virtue of their ideas and policies.

That’s just what Bill Clinton would like you to think.