My strategy is to get a conservative party in the US built that can claim a serious spoiler status: 15%-30% of the electorate. To do so, the first step is to not united behind centrists like Romney. That is the paramount goal. Getting Obama beaten would be nice, but not at the cost of having conservative movement, that just learned how to show real teeth in 2010, back on the reservation.
You seem to have some fixation of Axelrod. One thing to learn from them indeed is what you point out: that they win by thinking 20 years ahead, and we field Doles, Bushes (twice), McCains and now Romney because we cannot think beyond 4 years.
Exactly. And while Carter was crashing (while Tip ONeil directed traffic after the wreck), the "planners" were working with 'educators' and lawyers and bureaucrats building the liberal skulls-full-of-mush breastworks that are still growing percentage of the population today.
I understand your eagerness to run to the front and frag a RINO General because he's not brash enough, but what's to learn from "THEM" is that the decade long slog comes from not grass-roots politicking NOW but from plowing the ground and forming the battlefield NOW with the next generation. The grass will naturally grow on that hill later.
You can't fix Washington with more or different Washington.
You have to tend to America while Washington does what it does, and try to minimize the damage meanwhile.