Because we are playing a precarious game here. There are forces in our party that won’t respond to anything but an out and out repudiation of their conventional ‘wisdom’.
You hear it all the time. A conservative candidate ‘can’t win’, so we have to nominate a loser who has no core values whatsoever. Said loser then gets into office and discredits our entire cause. We get told these lies all the time and far too many rank and file Republicans buy into them. It would have been far better for our cause to have won this outright.
Of course, if Doug Hoffman really lost for any reason, it was because he didn’t really start to get used to public speaking until the last 48 hours of the campaign. I hope he does a lot of practicing for 2010.
It’s not the end of the world, but it’s an uphill battle within our party now that would have been better to nip in the bud. I feel better about it now that the final numbers are in, but it still stings.
It will be an uphill battle no matter what happens - those in power like to stay in power. Repudiating the “conventional wisdom” will likely be just as difficult as convincing large numbers of American blacks that Obama is beneath them.
But in the RINO v. Conservative contest, this was a slightly ambiguous win for conservatives. We need to straighten out the ambiguity, but it’s a step toward that goal.
Just as a side note - I find it quite satisfying to see that Firefox does not recognize either “Barack” or “Obama” as legitimate words! ;-P