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As much as I agree with you about your assessment of Sarah Palin, I am afraid I must disagree with you about the state of play. We are two years away from the next election and there is no need now to mobilize the base. The need now is to come to Jesus, that is, to find out in our soul what it means to be a conservative. That is the first step. We would be proceeding wrongfooted if we set out looking for a savior. First we have to have a philosophy. I do agree that very likely the leader of the party will be the man (or in this case a woman) who can articulate a philosophy which can, Reagan -like, stitch together the disparate elements of the party, fiscal conservatives, social conservatives, national Defense conservatives, into a coherent fabric which will pull together instead of pulling apart as they are doing now. But, have a care, I do not mean that the spokesperson (I hate that politically correct term I meant to say and "spokesman") should be someone who appeals to my third of the conservative base. I want a leader who can represent all three legs of the conservative stool. Any fewer will condemn us to another electoral defeat.

In this context, I would prefer Sarah Palin because she has the makings of all three legs of the conservative stool in her biography if she can put away a regrettable tendency toward populism. But I am not going to anoint Palin, I want her to emerge from a Darwinian contest as the clear winner of the ideological consensus which moves the majority of Americans. The very worst scenario would be to impose someone, for example Sarah Palin, on New York's fiscal conservatives who will bolt because they feel she is too provincial. Let her win over the Peggy Noonan's and the William F. Buckley Jr.'s by getting out there and changing her image. If she cannot do so she must fall by the wayside. I am not going to can sacrifice the conservative movement to appease social conservatives.. We just did that for national defense Conservatives and it cost us the last two elections, it put us in the wilderness for perhaps a generation, and it may well have exposed the country to a Manchurian Marxist who will ultimately sabotage both the national Defense of the United States and Israel which were main motivations of the neocons in the first place.

George Bush came to us and said he was a "compassionate conservative." I did not know what the hell it meant, I have learned over eight years to my sorrow what it means. I do not want the party again to be led down a path by a piper who only shows us some part of his character. I want it committed conservative who will serve all three legs of the conservative movement. I want him tested and I want him proven. We only had two years to do it so we better get on with the job now so that when we need to motivate the base for the next election we will have a real base worth motivating.

“We are two years away from the next election and there is no need now to mobilize the base”

Of course there is.
We just saw proof of the need to mobilize the base in the Georgia Senate elections, where Gov Palin energized the base and helped gain an extra 10% in votes for Chambliss, over what the polls had said.
With a hard line Stalinist and Marxist in the White House from January, this is exactly the time to mobilize conservatives. Last thing you want to do is wait till 2010 or 2012 before attempting to mobilize the base. That's what McCain did. He ignored the base for 4 years, then wanted to same base to vote for him this year. Of course that got him nowhere, and rightfully so,

I am not going to can sacrifice the conservative movement to appease social conservatives..
***Hey Buttheadford, this is a social conservative website.

I’m a big tent republican.

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1821435/posts?page=6245#6245

Here’s an analogy to work with. Take a small box and fill it with some rocks. Then add some rice, filling it to the top. Now take all the same stuff, but in a different order. Put in the rice first, then add the rocks. What you’ll find is that if you put in the big stuff first, the small stuff will fit around it. But if you put in the small stuff first, the big stuff won’t have room. The republican tent is the box. The Big issues are the socon issues, to be put in first. The little issues are things that can be accommodated around the bigger stuff. A candidate who tries to focus on the smaller issues first and leave out the bigger issues has no way of getting all of us into the tent. He splits the party. The candidate who gets the big stuff right and as much of the little stuff that will fit, he can fit more into the tent. We’re often amazed at how much rice can keep fitting in. Rudy Giuliani flunks some of the big issues, and on some of the little issues it looks to me like anyone else’s rice would do just as well. All that remains for us to agree on is which are the bedrock principles and which are not. Why would there be so much invective aimed at rudy from the right? Because there are some bedrock principles that he is leaving out. Bad move. I see rudybot postings all the time saying that they would vote for Hunter, and I see socon postings that say they would not vote for rudy. That’s a BIG indicator of a few bedrock principles that are being left outside the tent in order to let in some rice.