Mike Pence has got to be both one of the bravest and one of the most optimistic men in Washington.

In a town where politicians are notoriously reluctant to say anything interesting on record and can be even more squeamish about deviating from their talking points in front of a gaggle of reporters, Rep.Pence is willing to sit down with an assortment of journalists for an entirely on-the-record breakfast. And while he’s there, he sounds remarkably upbeat about the prospects for his party in the upcoming midterm election, despite being one of the most strident voices castigating his fellow travelers for their abandonment of core conservative principles. It’s a thin tightrope to walk indeed.

The Indiana Republican’s cheery outlook seems more than a little misplaced considering the very unconservative messes his party keeps making for itself. Heading into November (or perhaps “careening toward” would be more apt), the congressional Republicans are trying to rally their conservative base around a party that can’t rouse itself to pass earmark reform under the gun of a corruption scandal, that hasn’t reformed an entitlement since the Clinton years, and that has presided over monumental spending increases and record-setting — in absolute dollar terms, anyway — deficits.

So it’s little wonder that voters are looking at their dissipative congressmen and thinking, “We’re supposed to vote for that?” To which Mr. Pence offers two responses, neither of which is entirely convincing.

First, Mr. Pence is at pains to note, some of the heat Republicans are taking is undeserved. In respect of earmarks, it’s true, as Mr. Pence points out, that Speaker Hastert and the Republican leadership have succeeded in changing House rules to introduce some long-overdue accountability into the appropriations process. The example misses the bigger picture, however. The rules change came in place of broader lobbying reform legislation that died as a result of irreconcilable differences between the House and Senate.

That’s not a bad thing — the bills contained a lot of dangerous erosions of the constitutional rights to speech and petition. Still, a mere rules change, as opposed to real legislation, leaves it lacking a certain “oomph” if the goal is to convince voters that Republicans are serious about reining in the fiscal recklessness undergirding the Abramoff scandal. Mr. Pence notes that the party’s lawmakers did eventually manage to cut tens of billions of dollars of spending in order to fund Katrina relief without borrowing or tax increases, although he deftly elides over the fact that many Republicans had to be dragged kicking and screaming.

Meantime, Mr. Pence’s hour-long discussion of congressional Republicaniana features one glaring omission: any substantive mention of the current majority leader, John Boehner. Mr. Pence speaks warmly of the speaker, Mr. Hastert, whom he calls a “man of integrity,” even though the speaker has often been less than effective at uniting Republicans behind the true conservative agenda favored by Mr. Pence. Even Mr. Boehner’s predecessor, Tom DeLay, makes an appearance in Mr. Pence’s recount of the Katrina offsetting victory.

Yet Mr. Boehner himself goes unmentioned, and with good reason, at least from the perspective of some conservatives. While the majority leader has achieved some measure of token damage control in the wake of the lobbying scandals, conservatives complain that he is too accommodating of moderate and liberal Republicans, making it harder for conservatives to push an agenda that would rally the base.

Still, even if you think Republicans are off course, Mr. Pence seems to suggest, then surely you have to admit that as bad as more of the same would be, the alternative would be so much worse. This point is explicitly intended as a rebuke to those — Ramesh Ponnuru and his recent op-ed in the New York Times come to mind, although he’s far from the only one — who argue that a chastening trip to the doghouse in November could house-train the party over the long run. To this crowd, Mr. Pence admonishes that “the antidote to what ails the Republican majority is not more of them. It’s more of us.” Later on, he trots out an insider-baseball anecdote about Senator Kennedy’s opposition to means-testing the Medicare prescription drug benefit as a reminder that more of “them” would mean even more bloated entitlements.

Mr. Pence is preaching to the choir among those for whom the “R” after the name is all that counts. But it looks less and less likely those who consider themselves conservatives first and Republicans second will be assuaged. Anyone who moves in conservative circles in Washington with any regularity will notice pretty quickly that, several years later, legislative monstrosities like No Child Left Behind and the Medicare prescription drug benefit still stick in a lot of craws, as does the majority’s inability to make permanent its earlier tax-cutting achievements.

Thus, the best hope for convincing this crowd may be to talk about the war. On that issue more than on any other, a Democratic victory in either chamber would be a calamity, likely leading to increased pressure for a disastrous accelerated drawdown and an interminable series of hearings on the Bush administration’s drive toward the war. And Mr. Pence formulates what sounds like a compelling way to frame the issue to an electorate that seems to be wearing down under a barrage of Democratic negativism.

“Hoosiers want us to come home,” Mr. Pence says of his constituents and, by extension, Americans at large, “but they want us to win and come home.” He allows that there’s a lot of what he calls “consternation” about the course of the war, but attributes that to skepticism over tactics and strategy, not over the fundamental mission. Asked by another attendee at the breakfast what “winning” means, Mr. Pence says that reaching the point at which America is absolutely confident in the nascent Iraqi democracy’s ability to sustain and defend its sovereignty would constitute a victory.

Only time will tell whether Republicans can deliver that message forcefully enough to bring wayward voters back into the fold and whether Iraq is enough to persuade skeptical conservatives to hold their noses and vote Republican. It looks increasingly like Republicans will have to count on the latter, because selling their domestic agenda is going to be an uphill battle.

Mr. Pence is betting that he and his allies in the Republican Study Committee can both browbeat the broader Republican Party into a return to its core conservative principles while convincing voters that Republicans are still at least conservative enough to merit votes in November. It’s a delicate balance. Hector his colleagues too much and voters will wonder why Republicans merit their support. But tout conservative “victories” too aggressively to voters, and wayward lawmakers may overhear and think they don’t need to reform themselves. It’s going to be a long tightrope walk from here to Election Day.