President Bush and other Republican leaders might voice optimism about their party's chances in 2008.

But at a Wednesday night panel discussion in downtown Denver focusing on the future of the GOP in the West, conservatives sounded about as cheery about the future as a group of Democrats the day after the 2004 presidential election.

"We're not defeatist up here," said Jon Caldara, a KOA radio talk show host and Independence Institute president, said towards the end of the forum. "We just have the wisdom to know that we're f***ed."

The discussion, sponsored by the conservative news Web site Face The State, featured social conservatives, business conservatives and libertarians - the three groups that Ronald Reagan helped unite to score big political wins for the GOP in the past 15 years.

But the event, entitled ""Democrats' Strategy to turn the Mountain West Blue, and What Libertarians and Conservatives Can Do About It," also showed how the once-strong unity between these groups in the "Reagan Coalition" is starting to fray.

Ryan Sager, a blogger and columnist for the New York Post, criticized social conservatives like James Dobson for quickly backing President Bush's decision to nominate Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court in 2005 - a nomination that was later withdrawn after howls of protest from some conservative circles wary of her competence and stances on abortion and other boilerplate conservative issues.

Jim Pfaff, president of the Colorado Family Institute, responded that Ryan's view was "shallow," saying when Miers was nominated "there was a huge multitude of (social conservatives) saying, ‘Whoa.'"

Later, two audience members got into an impromptu debate over whether the Founding Fathers supported - and grew - marijuana.  

About the one thing the four panelists and the heavily conservative audience did vocally agree on was the need to reunite themselves against a surging Democratic Party in Colorado and the West.

"In the interior West, it's not a question of whether it's going to go blue," Sager said. "It's going headlong into blue."

More than one panelist suggested - sometimes to half-facetious boos from the audience - that the Republicans need to adapt successful Democratic tactics in fundraising and targeting voters.

But the panelists - and the audience - agreed that before the Republican Party can stop the blue trend in the West, it needs to return to the small-government, individual-rights values on which the "Reagan Coalition" was founded.

Caldara, a self-described libertarian, criticized Colorado Republicans like former Gov. Bill Owens for allowing increased spending on frivolous projects such as bull semen research.

"The problem's not getting Republicans to win," Caldara said. "It's getting Republicans to act like Republicans."

But Gene Healy,senior editor at the libertarian Cato Institute in Washington D.C., said one party controlling both the White House and the Congress might not be as desirable as it seems.

"We just ran that experiment - how's that working out?" Healy asked to mild applause.