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Is it really different this time?

That’s what Republican political strategists are asking as party leaders and presidential prospects keep raising the bar in their quest to curb government deficits. As thrilling as that process feels for Tea Party members and conservative intellectuals, its merit as an electoral formula remains unproven at best.

Representative Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, chairman of the House Budget Committee, set the tone when he warned of fiscal catastrophe in his response to President Obama’s State of the Union address. Govs. Mitch Daniels of Indiana and Chris Christie of New Jersey have grown progressively more blunt in calling for big changes to Medicare and Social Security.

Now Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin has seized the spotlight with his showdown with state workers — a made-for-cable spectacle at the dawning of a new presidential race that has galvanized Republican budget hawks and unions allied with Democrats.

“That’s how the race is going to evolve,” said Scott Reed, who managed Senator Robert Dole’s campaign for the White House in 1996. “It’s going to be the serious and the unserious.”

That increases pressure on Republican presidential contenders to match bracing specifics from the likes of Governor Christie, who last week unequivocally embraced an increase in the Social Security retirement age. But shadowing such discussions are the setbacks that befell President Ronald Reagan, former Speaker Newt Gingrich and President George W. Bush when they attempted similar bold moves.

It is one thing to acknowledge that the entitlement programs Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid drive the nation’s long-term deficit. It is another to win a national election while pledging to scale them back.

“It’s not the third rail,” cautioned Ken Khachigian, a speechwriter for Mr. Reagan, “until you touch it.”

Lessons of 1980

Every presidential campaign has its own distinct backdrop. Four years ago, the contest began after midterm elections that were dominated by the Iraq war.

In early 1999, the economy was booming and the federal government had just recorded its first budget surplus in three decades. George W. Bush, then governor of Texas, assumed the good times would continue in calling for “prosperity with a purpose.”

In early 2011, high unemployment and enormous budget deficits have Republicans warning of national decline, as they did during Jimmy Carter’s presidency.

“I would compare it somewhat to 1980,” Mr. Khachigian said. If the analogy holds, Republican candidates will use fiscal issues to compete for the mantle of bold conservative leadership that Mr. Reagan captured.

But another lesson of 1980 is that unexpected events can rapidly shift the agenda. Nine days before Mr. Reagan announced his candidacy in November 1979, Iranian revolutionaries seized American diplomats in Tehran — the start of the hostage crisis that became a major factor in that race.

Moreover, the primary calendar may shape the campaign’s dialogue in unexpected ways. “Social conservatives still drive the bus in Iowa,” Mr. Reed noted.

That may explain one little-noticed recent line from Gov. Haley Barbour of Mississippi that established a contrast with Mr. Daniels’s call for a “truce” on social issues in deference to fiscal and economic challenges.

“A lot of people think while Republican governors were attacking fiscal issues we were ignoring social issues — that’s not right,” Mr. Barbour told the Conservative Political Action Conference. Highlighting “my pro-life agenda,” he invoked an anti-abortion group’s declaration that Mississippi is “the safest state in America for an unborn child.”

Entitlement Debate

What is sometimes forgotten about Mr. Reagan as a candidate is that he only carried tough talk so far about cutting spending.

“This does not mean sacrificing essential services; nor do we need to destroy the system of benefits which flow to the poor, the elderly, the sick and the handicapped,” he said in announcing his 1980 campaign.

It was only after he won the presidency that Mr. Reagan’s administration proposed cuts in Social Security. The president quickly backed off, but the Republicans still suffered a backlash in the 1982 Congressional elections.

Voters also punished them when Mr. Gingrich, against the advice of campaign strategists, sought to curb Medicare spending in 1995. His struggles over the issue helped President Bill Clinton win re-election the following year — and persuaded Congressional Republicans in 2005 to bury President George W. Bush’s proposal for a partial privatization of Social Security.

With renewed zeal, House Republican leaders now pledge that the budget Mr. Ryan is working on will tackle entitlement spending. And that has campaign strategists worried once again.

“There’s a difference between saying public employee unions have to take cuts, and attacking programs like Social Security and Medicare,” said Tom Rath, an influential New Hampshire Republican. Mr. Rath’s preferred presidential candidate, former Gov. Mitt Romney of Massachusetts, steered clear of the entitlement debate in his CPAC speech.

“Chris Christie was pretty brave,” Mr. Khachigian said. “But it’s pretty clear he’s not running for president.”

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6:55 p.m. | Updated The top Republican on the Senate intelligence committee said Tuesday that he opposes ratification of a new arms control treaty with Russia because he considers its verification measures inadequate, dealing a blow to President Obama’s chances of winning approval this year.

Senator Christopher S. Bond of Missouri, the Republican vice chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, said the inspections called for in the so-called New Start treaty would not be enough to keep watch over Russia’s nuclear arsenal and that Moscow cannot be trusted to abide by the pact.

“This does not have robust verification,” Mr. Bond said in an interview. “Their record of cheating has been documented by the State Department on every treaty we’ve had with them over the years. And I don’t think we gain very much from it.”

The White House made no on-the-record response, but administration officials who insisted on anonymity to avoid debating an individual senator disputed his characterization, saying the reformulated inspection system would provide what one called a “more detailed look than ever before” at Russia’s nuclear arsenal.

“Those who have been criticizing the regime, they haven’t dug down deeply enough,” the official said.

While Mr. Bond has not been among the Republicans the White House thought it could win over, his position could be influential among his party colleagues because of his role in overseeing the intelligence community. Mr. Bond said he has seen secret information justifying his skepticism about the verification and has outlined those concerns in a letter to his colleagues. “I’ve got a classified statement saying why it’s not verifiable,” he said.

Mr. Bond made his position known in a floor statement last week that went largely unnoticed until the Washington Times wrote about it on Tuesday. It came at the same time that Senator Jon Kyl of Arizona, the No. 2 Republican in the Senate and his party’s lead negotiator with the administration on the treaty, said there was not enough time in the lame-duck session to consider the pact this year. Mr. Obama has responded with a high-profile campaign to press the Senate to vote before adjourning.

Because a treaty requires a two-thirds majority, Mr. Obama needs at least nine Republicans to reach 67 votes this year and so far has just one, Senator Richard G. Lugar of Indiana; if the treaty gets pushed off until next year, that will go up to 14 and White House officials have said they fear that delay means death for the agreement. Senate Democratic leaders have pledged to bring the treaty to a floor vote next month.

The White House has not given up on convincing Mr. Kyl, recognizing that without him it may not be possible to win enough Republicans. As a tradeoff for the treaty, Mr. Kyl has insisted on an expansive investment in modernizing the nuclear weapons complex. The administration has pledged $85 billion over the next 10 years, but Mr. Kyl wants further assurances that the money will be sufficient and actually come through.

Mr. Obama said over the weekend that he had spoken with Mr. Kyl to try to address his concerns, and Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. followed up with a phone call this week.

The treaty has opened a divide among Republicans. While some like Mitt Romney, the possible presidential candidate, have come out against it, prominent former Republican national security officials support it, including former secretaries of state Henry A. Kissinger, James A. Baker III and George P. Shultz.

Patrick Buchanan, the conservative commentator who worked for Richard M. Nixon and Ronald Reagan, wrote in a column on Tuesday that both of those presidents would have supported the treaty.

“Simply because this treaty is ‘Obama’s treaty’ does not mean it is not in America’s interest,” Mr. Buchanan wrote. “If Republicans should kill New Start, and Vladimir Putin responds by using U.S. rejection to rev up Russian nationalism to terminate the ‘reset’ and return to a policy of cooperating with America’s enemies from Pyongyang to Tehran to Caracas, does the Republican Party wish to be held responsible for that?”

The treaty would bar both sides from deploying more than 1,550 strategic warheads and 700 launchers and resume inspections that halted last December with the expiration of the original Start treaty.

Under the new treaty, each side could conduct 18 on-site inspections a year instead of the 28 permitted in the past. Administration officials, including top Pentagon generals, have said that the redesigned inspection system would be more effective and that they would have to monitor only 35 Russian facilities compared with 70 in the old Soviet Union.

The new inspection system, designed with the help of former inspectors, was intended to build on years of experience to increase transparency, officials said. Among other things, each missile and heavy bomber would be tagged with a unique identifying tag. Each side would have to provide the other with detailed briefings that go beyond past verification. And inspectors would actually be able to count how many warheads are mounted on each missile, which they did not in the past.

Administration officials note that if the treaty is not ratified, then there will be no inspections, and they point to the endorsement of James Clapper, the director of national intelligence, who said recently: “From an intelligence perspective only, are we better off with it or without it? We’re better off with it.”

A State Department report over the summer documented several disputes with Russia over compliance with the original Start treaty, some of which were settled and some of which remained unresolved when the pact went out of force, raising concerns among critics about whether Russia can be trusted. At the same time, the report concluded that Russia lived up to the “central limits” of the treaty.

Senator James Risch, an Idaho Republican, voted against the treaty in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on Sept. 16 saying he had seen alarming intelligence that impacted the treaty. Administration officials said Tuesday that the intelligence had nothing to do with verification of New Start and had not changed the conclusions of the intelligence community about the treaty.

Mr. Bond said he sent a classified letter on Sept. 15 to Mr. Lugar and Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts, the Democratic committee chairman, and copied to other senators, outlining his concerns about verification. Administration officials said the objections raised in Mr. Bond’s letter were unrelated to the intelligence cited by Mr. Risch.

In Tuesday’s interview, Mr. Bond said that Russia gets more out of the New Start treaty than the United States does and that Moscow can still get around its limits in a variety of ways. The value of resuming inspections, he said, was not enough to make the treaty worthwhile. The United States gets “some modest benefits from it but not enough,” he said. “It gives us a false sense of security, particularly because they’ve cheated on every treaty.”

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