I’ve spoken at length to three smart and influential Republican strategists in recent days and thought I’d share their thoughts on their party’s status. Some of their remarks were on the record and some of them weren’t, but I’ll call them X, Y, and Z in order to be able to use as many of their thoughts as possible. I’ll break this into a few posts. Here’s the overview: Two of them were worried about the fallout from the Schiavo case, two of them were bearish about DeLay—but all three of them were moderately bullish about Republican success on Social Security.