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I believe the state of conservatism is in good stead at this point.

However, I don’t equate the state of conservatism with the political landscape. Would I like a government consisting solely of solidly conservative representatives? Probably. Will we ever have that? no way. And unless the entire country is conservative, we shouldn’t — the idea of a republic is to have representatives of all the people, and you are going to have liberals, conservatives, and libertarians of all stripes.

More importantly, we simply aren’t getting enough electable conservatives running for office yet, even for offices where you might well be able to elect a conservative. There are two parts to being electable.

First, you have to have the possibilitity of appealing philosophically to a majority of the voters. That is hard when you are a strong conservative, except that a lot of people who aren’t really conservative do like how “conservative” translates to government.

The second is to actually HAVE appeal, to be able to communicate effectively so that you can convince people who might support your philosophy to vote for you, and maybe even to win people over to your opinion.

Unfortunately, often that 2nd characteristic requires a canddidate be “politic” — to speak in a way that doesn’t sound rigid, to even show willingness to compromise with some aspects of principle in order to acheive a positive outcome.

In California, it seems foolhardy to think that strong conservatism would appeal to a majority of the voters. On it’s best days, California is decidedly biased toward a less moderate position. However, they are broke, and the voters are scared, and will vote for a strong fiscal conservative message, even if they aren’t on board with the whole basket.

Could a Ronald Reagan pull it off? Maybe so — he had a way with words and could put people at ease. He also had a pragamatic attitude, even though he stood firm on principle. But DeVore isn’t Ronald Reagan.

Anyway, politics isn’t really for ideologues. Sure, they play, and you can’t piss them off too much because they are happy to prove their point by electing people far to the opposite end of their beliefs to “stick it to” the people that agree mostly with them.

But you can’t just appeal to that group. And you certainly can’t appeal to the subgroup of ideologues that expect purity on virtually every political question. Not and win elections in a two-party system.

Lastly, we’ll never elect solid conservatives in any great numbers if the moderate wing of the republican party thinks we can’t be trusted to play the game. The idea is to have a primary, and then pull together to support the winner. Crist is the latest example of not playing the game. And we know that moderates do jump ship too often when conservatives win primaries, but conservatives also jump ship on a regular basis.

That’s certainly a good way to keep pure, but a lousy way to win elections.

So, until the day when we have a leader who is able to educate a majority of the country to agree with us on every issue, we’re going to have to put up with a candidate like Carly Fionora in California. Do I wish that DeVore had proven himself capable of appealing to the electorate — sure. But his poll numbers among the people most likely to support him prove otherwise.

Just as Duncan Hunter, bless his heart, showed himself entirely incapable of articulating conservatism in a way that excited significant numbers of people — hence his lousy poll numbers and near-nonexistant support in the primaries.

I liked that Sarah Palin didn’t say anything bad about DeVore. She simply said who she thought was the best chance of helping the conservative cause come November.

I’ve had my fill of people of the overly pragmatic squishy wing of the republican party. But too often the conservative activists are too busy with friendly fire to advance the cause.