Time and again, the mandates of majorities have been defeated by disasters that overtook the once all-powerful figure in the White House. And while they can't really talk about it in public, this is the one route most likely to bring the Republicans of today back to power in some still-to-be-determined tomorrow.

What will it take for Republicans to recover from their 2008 electoral disaster? It's a big question, but the answer is really pretty simple. The cure for electoral disaster is usually found in real disaster.

Defeated parties sometimes make changes that make them more politically attractive next time around. But what ultimately brings them back is a dose of really bad news for the country, which usually translates into good news for the opposition (whichever party that happens to be).

This month's election sent Republicans sifting through the ruins of a power structure that just two years ago encompassed all of official Washington. In search of an explanation and a sense of how to rebuild, they seem to be reaching a conclusion well beyond the flaws in John McCain's campaign or the heavy burdens of a faltering economy and a failed presidency.

The consensus among conservatives is that the GOP deserved a drubbing not for losing touch with the electorate, but for drifting too far from the movement's own ideological moorings. The prescription is not to widen the outreach but to bind the party more securely to its orthodoxy and find better messengers to carry the message.

Those preaching this form of redemption take inspiration from an earlier debacle and subsequent rebirth. In 1964, the GOP nominated Barry "Conscience of a Conservative" Goldwater, who got just 38.5 percent of the vote against Democrat Lyndon B. Johnson. It was among the most resounding landslides in our history, and obituaries for the losing party were ubiquitous.

Yet it only took two years for Republicans to bounce back in the 1966 midterm elections, when they took away a stunning 47 seats in the House and three in the Senate. Two years later, the Democratic nominee got less than 43 percent of the presidential vote, Four years later, the Democrat would get just 37.5 percent, 1 point under Goldwater.

For the past 40 years, it has been GOP dogma that the Goldwater loss was not only worthwhile but essential: It established the party as the home of conservatism in America and pointed the way to wins in five of the next six presidential cycles (and seven of the next 10).

But did the GOP's turn to the right in the mid-1960s really propel the party's later dominance, or was it the sequence of catastrophes that befell the country under LBJ and, later, Jimmy Carter?

Within months of winning, Johnson was escalating the Vietnam War and making his presidency hostage to it. In 1965, the year he pushed through Medicare and the Voting Rights Act, rioting broke out in Los Angeles. Unrest spread to other cities, and the era's turmoil in the country and its culture would take a toll we are still measuring today. Johnson and his party became symbols of disunity and turbulence, demons it has taken Democrats decades to exorcise.

Such boom-and-bust cycles are the dynamic for much of our presidential history. Republican Herbert Hoover looked to be on top of the world when he won all but eight states in 1928. He had been in office only months when the stock market crashed and began the downturn that became the Great Depression.

Richard Nixon won 49 states in 1972, and his disasters began immediately. As the Watergate scandal was followed by the first Arab oil embargo, recession, inflation and the fall of Saigon, the Democrats reached another apogee in the elections of 1974 and 1976 (when the country elected Carter).

Time and again, the mandates of majorities have been defeated by disasters that overtook the once all-powerful figure in the White House. And while they can't really talk about it in public, this is the one route most likely to bring the Republicans of today back to power in some still-to-be-determined tomorrow.

There's nothing new about this. In politics, it's simply the circle of life. And the cycles continue. In 2004, after John Kerry had failed to dislodge George W. Bush, many Republicans thought they had finally established what Karl Rove called "a durable majority." One thing was clear in that moment: There wasn't going to be any more good news for Democrats until there had been some very bad news for the country. And before long, there was.

First came Hurricane Katrina and its miserable aftermath. Then Iraq got bad enough to turn voters against the war and cost Republicans control of the House and Senate in 2006. The following year, cracks appeared in the success story of the American economy, and the next year those cracks split wide open and revealed how hollow our prosperity was at its core.

Parties dismissed from power the way Republicans were in 2006 and 2008 do not regain their standing simply by being better stewards of their own ideas and programs. It will take a fresh disaster befalling the country in the months or years ahead, one that will make the country forget about the Bush administration and turn its ire on Obama and the Democrats in Congress.