The Economist has some opinions on the current state of the GOP's intellectual leadership:
There are any number of reasons for the Republican Party’s defeat on November 4th. But high on the list is the fact that the party lost the battle for brains. Barack Obama won college graduates by two points, a group that George Bush won by six points four years ago. He won voters with postgraduate degrees by 18 points. And he won voters with a household income of more than $200,000—many of whom will get thumped by his tax increases—by six points. John McCain did best among uneducated voters in Appalachia and the South.
The Republicans lost the battle of ideas even more comprehensively than they lost the battle for educated votes, marching into the election armed with nothing more than slogans...
[...]
Republicanism’s anti-intellectual turn is devastating for its future. The party’s electoral success from 1980 onwards was driven by its ability to link brains with brawn. The conservative intelligentsia not only helped to craft a message that resonated with working-class Democrats, a message that emphasised entrepreneurialism, law and order, and American pride. It also provided the party with a sweeping policy agenda. The party’s loss of brains leaves it rudderless, without a compelling agenda.
[...]
Why is this happening? One reason is that conservative brawn has lost patience with brains of all kinds, conservative or liberal. Many conservatives—particularly lower-income ones—are consumed with elemental fury about everything from immigration to liberal do-gooders. They take their opinions from talk-radio hosts such as Rush Limbaugh and the deeply unsubtle Sean Hannity. And they regard Mrs Palin’s apparent ignorance not as a problem but as a badge of honour.
Another reason is the degeneracy of the conservative intelligentsia itself, a modern-day version of the 1970s liberals it arose to do battle with: trapped in an ideological cocoon, defined by its outer fringes, ruled by dynasties and incapable of adjusting to a changed world. The movement has little to say about today’s pressing problems, such as global warming and the debacle in Iraq, and expends too much of its energy on xenophobia, homophobia and opposing stem-cell research.
The author of that piece has some important observations, but is mixing up whether, on the one hand, the GOP effectively appeals to educated people with whether, on the other hand, they're a party of ideas and intellectual heft. But voters typically don't cast votes based on the sophistication of a party's policy platforms or stated view of government and society. And being smart and educated doesn't mean that one will not succumb to appeals that are intellectually vacuous or politically irresponsible; Nader voters probably have higher average levels of education than voters for either the Democrats or the Republicans. There are a lot of smart people who dumb things.
While it certainly helps to have a robust intellectual and policy apparatus and party intellectuals who produce impressive analyses, manifestos and works of learned scholarship for the reading and thinking public, it's certainly not necessary in order to win elections, or at least to get a lot of votes. In 1968 George Wallace won 46 electoral votes, and while it's certainly true that his campaign was devised and run by some clever people, it was certainly not a campaign of "ideas" and appeals to the intellect.
Furthermore, much of the GOP's ascendancy during the 80's, leading to their eventual takeover of Congress in 1994 and consummated with their 4 years of complete control over the Federal government from 2003 through 2007 was built not on ideas, but on resentment. The "angry white male" who helped propel the Gingrich revolt not only wasn't reading works of political theory or the policy white papers of GOP thinkers. The typical Angry White Male was reacting against the changes wrought by liberal policies, by societal changes, and to the economic insecurity as deindustrialization wracked the nation's traditional bases of mass employment like manufacturing.
There was also a strong element of racism at play in the Republicans' rise from the 60's through the 90's. From Nixon's Southern Strategy (formulated in part by Kevin Phillips, a GOP intellectual who eventually broke from his party and has become on of the most vociferous critics of the entire Bush family), through the Reagan team's decision to kick off their 1980 general election campaign in Philadelphia, Mississippi—location of the 1964 murders of civil rights workers Chaney, Goodman and Schwerner—through voter suppression of African-Americans in 2000 and 2004, the GOP has benefited from dividing white and black voters. A lot of voters who didn't value intellectual sophistication and the pronouncements of academic and government elites had been voting Democratic in the Jim Crow solid South. After the Civil Rights and Voting Rights acts opened up the franchise to African-Americans in the former states of the Confederacy, a lot of those voters didn't become less intellectual than they had been. They simply switched allegiance to the party that picked up the mantle of state's rights.
Finally, it didn't take accomplished and serious intellectuals to lead the GOP and the broader conservative movement to electoral success. There were a few legitimate conservative intellectuals who were important to the rise of conservatism. The godfather of modern conservatism, William F. Buckley, did not hide his erudition. A few thinkers important to conservative thought, like the social scientist James Q Wilson and the essayist Russell Kirk deserve their reputations as serious thinkers.
But as John Judis showed in The Paradox of American Democracy: Elites, Special Interests and the Betrayal of the Public Trust, the conservative movement was largely a reaction to the New Deal, and the "ideas" that came forth to question the New Deal were mostly the product of corporate-funded think tanks like Heritage and The American Enterprise Institute that produce ideologically-driven shoddy work that demeans and discredits empirically sound social science.
Even the most prominent "intellectuals" associated with the GOP have tended to be hacks. For instance, David Brooks is a moderately clever guy, but intellectually he's an embarrassment; his forays in to pop sociology are laughably inept. And look at this career path of possibly the most credentialed and influential GOP party intellectual, William Kristol:
I remember back in the late '90s when Ira Katznelson, an eminent political scientist at Columbia, came to deliver a guest lecture to an economic philosophy class I was taking. It was a great lecture, made more so by the fact that the class was only about ten or twelve students and we got got ask all kinds of questions and got a lot of great, provocative answers. Anyhow, Prof. Katznelson described a lunch he had with Irving Kristol back either during the first Bush administration. The talk turned to William Kristol, then Dan Quayle's chief of staff, and how he got his start in politics. Irving recalled how he talked to his friend Harvey Mansfield at Harvard, who secured William a place there as both an undergrad and graduate student; how he talked to Pat Moynihan, then Nixon's domestic policy adviser, and got William an internship at The White House; how he talked to friends at the RNC and secured a job for William after he got his Harvard Ph.D.; and how he arranged with still more friends for William to teach at UPenn and the Kennedy School of Government. With that, Prof. Katznelson recalled, he then asked Irving what he thought of affirmative action. "I oppose it", Irving replied. "It subverts meritocracy."
The Economist is right that voters rejected the anti-intellectualism of the GOP. But far more important was that for the first time since 1920's, the Republicans both controlled all the levers of the Federal government, and (unlike the two years of GOP control of Congress that overlapped with the Eisenhower administration) were waging war on the New Deal. When they achieved that authority over the government, the Republicans didn't demonstrate the compelling force and appeal of their ideas, but instead revealed the destructive results of their intellectual vacuity and contempt for government: the "Brownie" response to Katrina, a failed war, a failed effort to privatize Social Security, attacks on science and social tolerance, and what could become the worst economic crisis since Hoover's response to the Great Depression.
Voters sometimes make bad decisions. Those bad decisions are often helped by losing parties that do a poor job of governing, of articulating their ideas or offering up compelling candidates that voters find trustworthy and deserving of their vote. Preventing such failures will remain a challenge for progressives and Democrats. But the GOP didn't win elections in recent decades because of their ideas and suddenly lose in 2006 and 2008 because they ran out of ideas. They lost in these last two elections in large part because their complete control of the Federal government from 2003 through 2007 exposed their paucity of ideas, desire to roll back the New Deal and contempt for responsible governance.