The GOP-e doesn’t have a club with membership cards. There are pundits, consultants, editorialists who have an audience, but no role or office in the party. There are people who hold office in the party on all levels who are determined on the local who send them to state, who send them to national. There are pros with various skills who are hired for those skills, there are policy people and campaign people.
All of these official job roles are, trust me, extremely tenuous. Two years is real longevity.
So:
A) How are you defining the ‘elite’ and specifically who are they and which of these are for or against conservatives and tea partiers? I have my own answers in the areas and locations I know. What are yours?
B) You should know that politics is the ultimate power game and alliances come and go determined by who has power at the moment. If you can build a movement of people of sufficient strength, as in votes, you have power.
C) Those in power always seek to maintain that power. Those without it always seek to take it. The latter win regularly, if they did not, we’d have the same party for decades. We rarely have the same party for four years, barring a two term president.
D) Anyone new candidate vying for the presidency of the United States knows they will have to find a way to neutralize, win-over or defeat the current in-power group. Reagan had a hell of a task with the Ford group. I happened to watch that one up close. It was truly brutal.
So, you say the “elite” were against Palin. I say, some and so what? If that scares a candidate off, they don’t have what it takes to fight anyway.
You seem to be saying this was the case with Palin. I don’t know of any evidence to support that, certainly not from Sarah.
This is too far over your head to get. The more you post, the more it shows.
Marco Rubio is a good example of this. He was criticized for being an extremist... a Tea Party know-nothing candidate.
Then he ran a good campaign against the wishes of the GOP establishment, then won, and became a great spokesman for conservative values..... one who could go on the Sunday morning shows and mix it up with people who disagreed with him and represent our values in a way that attracts people not repels them.
If Sarah Palin took the same path, I think she could gotten more support from the party.