Everyone dwells on the Democrats’ problems: They have no discrete platform, they have no single voice, they have no compelling personalities, they have no response to the modern scourge of terrorism, they have no hope of melding their 20th-century commitment to the poor and the striving to the 21st-century problems of the economy and globalism.

That’s the situation over there in the left corner. Over there in the right corner, the difficulties may be even more severe. Indeed, there may be no time in the past generation when both parties have been so troubled.

The Republicans hold the White House and have done so for 25 of the past 37 years. That’s real domination. The Republicans hold both houses of Congress and have done so for the past 11 years. That means the GOP has sunk deep roots on Capitol Hill. And yet the party that seems so firmly anchored in power seems adrift, top to bottom.

That doesn’t mean the Republicans will necessarily be forced to surrender power.But the Republicans’ confidence has been shattered nationally, and their direction is unclear. Moreover, President Bush’s approval rating fell so far in the first year of his second term (37 percentage points, according to figures from Gallup compiled by the National Journal) that if he manages to rebound to an average 45 percent for the remainder of his second term, he will have engineered the greatest recovery of any modern president.

Six years into the Bush Era (Part II), the Republicans seem to be suffering from a classic case of political exhaustion.

These have been, to be sure, exhausting years, with terrorist attacks, two wars, economic uncertainty, rising pressures from globalism and difficult adjustments in a period of transition in the retail, technological and media sectors. But all periods, even those we remember as quiet, are busy and exhausting. The Clinton years included conflicts in central Europe and the horn of Africa, upheavals over the budget deficit, health care and taxes, and silly distractions like the president’s dalliances that nonetheless raised important civic questions about the connection between politicians’ private character and their public character.

A physician might suggest that a respite from office and responsibility might cure the Republicans’ woes, but no party has ever been willing to step aside from power so as to re-energize itself. So the Republicans will soldier on, seeking to cure themselves even as they struggle with serious political, policy and moral struggles such as these:

A small war growing longer, if not larger. Iraq was the first pre-emptive war (we can argue about Vietnam and the Mexican War another morning), and its successful start has been followed by a difficult passage. The president won re-election as a wartime president, but his constant reiteration of the rationale for that war suggests that he hasn’t yet made the sale. (Weapons of mass destruction having failed to be found, the Iraq conflict has been transformed from a quick strike against a rogue nation into a long struggle against irredentists and terrorists.) Lincoln, Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt needed no such repeat performances. This is Mr. Bush’s war, even more than the War of 1812 was Mr. Madison’s war.

Freedoms at home during a fight for others’ freedom abroad. One of the most difficult parts of America’s Cold War experience, never fully achieved, was to preserve freedom domestically while striving to extend it internationally. The blacklists and dark hearings of the McCarthy era remain a blotch on America’s complexion. The Republicans were born as America’s party of freedom, and during the civil rights era many Republicans played indispensable roles in extending freedoms to African Americans.

Now Republicans are in danger of reaching for another part of their heritage – from Alger Hiss to Watergate – in permitting surveillance, and sowing suspicion, of American citizens, provoking deep unease among many in the libertarian wing of the party.

Radio silence on domestic issues. The challenges abroad are grave (and the cost to Americans in blood and treasure is great), so it is not unreasonable to expect that much of Washington’s attention should be directed toward those problems. But since the White House virtually abandoned its Social Security initiative a half year ago, it has also virtually abandoned the initiative in domestic affairs. Not that the Democrats have seized the opening and the opportunity the administration has presented.

Lobby follies. In the long history of political scandal – and here the phrases Teapot Dome and Watergate come to mind, along with the veritable leasing of the Lincoln bedroom in the Clinton years – the Abramoff scandal sits apart in terms of pure cynicism. Mr. Abramoff and his colleagues simply sought to bilk Indian tribes and to buy a good part of Washington. The threat for the Republicans is that the Abramoff affair may stand as a symbol of the failings of a party that went to Washington as reformers. The editorial page of The Wall Street Journal, no pinko rag, chides: “Too many Republicans are living in a political fantasy that they can purge the Abramoff taint merely by banishing Tom DeLay and making it harder for lobbyists to pay their links fees. Voters aren’t as dumb as they think.”

The fatigue factor. The cumulative effect of the elements above is the notion that the Republicans have run out of steam, run out of ideas, run out of people. That happens. Republicans in Congress have less than 10 months to prove it isn’t so – and then Republicans nationwide have to begin to come to grips with the succession problem in the White House, and to determine whether they are in a position to argue that nothing succeeds like success.