I worry about the “name recognition movement”, if for no other reason than, as the Fred Thompson recruitment showed, we don’t have any solid conservatives with great name recognition to call on.
What we need to do, and what we needed to be doing for the past 15 years, is finding good conservatives who nobody knew about, and grooming them through the process so that they were available.
But in a majority, the goal is often to preserve that majority, not find new blood. So the democrats did all the grooming and finding, and we were stuck with whatever we had in office.
Now we get a chance to find some good conservatives and run them. In my 11th district of Virginia, our incumbent is gone, and I hope we can get a conservative to run for the seat. But I see the push to talk some good person already elected as a delegate in the state to run for the office, because of “name recognition”. I’d rather groom a new candidate, so we had more, than recycle existing candidates.
Unfortunatly, as part of that process, conservatives have to be willing to support some pretty non-conservative candidates in the general election if our conservatives can’t win the primaries. Otherwise, our talk about “party loyalty” to the moderates when we want them to support our conservative candidates that they don’t really like will be seen as crass opportunism.
The point of a party is you battle in the primary, and together you promise to support whoever wins, in the hope that it will be mutually beneficial.
If conservatives abandon all the nominees that weren’t our pick, well be no better than the “RINOs” we have screamed about who said they were republican, voted in our primaries, but when they didn’t win would run off and be 3rd-party candidates, or stay home, or even endorse and work for the democrat.
Until a majority of the people in this country are conservative, we are going to have to vote for some moderate republicans in the general election.
Unfortunatly, as part of that process, conservatives have to be willing to support some pretty non-conservative candidates in the general election if our conservatives can’t win the primaries. Otherwise, our talk about “party loyalty” to the moderates when we want them to support our conservative candidates that they don’t really like will be seen as crass opportunism.
***I take care of that by being up front about my lack of party loyalty. I expect RINOs to be upfront about their RINOism and FRiberals to be upfront about their liberalism, so it’s only fair that I be up front about my lack of loyalty. And that is reflected on the first page of Free Republic as well: “We are not connected to or funded by any political party, news agency, or any other entity.”
The point of a party is you battle in the primary, and together you promise to support whoever wins, in the hope that it will be mutually beneficial.
***But if the choice ends up antithetical to someone’s belief system, I do not expect them to vote for the nominee. For instance, if someone’s big thing is WOT, and we push forth some candidate who’s good on other stuff but kinda weak on the WOT thing, that’s a compromise for them; but it’s different than if we push forth a candidate who is ANTI-WOT and all that it entails, we then shouldn’t expect the WOTers to vote for such a candidate.
If conservatives abandon all the nominees that weren’t our pick, well be no better than the “RINOs” we have screamed about who said they were republican, voted in our primaries, but when they didn’t win would run off and be 3rd-party candidates, or stay home, or even endorse and work for the democrat.
***I disagree. There’s an entire spectrum of what you say, from “abandon all the nominees that weren’t our pick” because they weren’t perfect (I don’t agree) to “abandon nominees that were antithetical to our beliefs” (which I do agree), so your statement is simply too all-encompassing.
Until a majority of the people in this country are conservative, we are going to have to vote for some moderate republicans in the general election.
***Nope. If you want to explore this further, I’ll go there, but you might want to look through this thread:
THE GOP DOESN’T WANT US- SO WHAT’S NEXT?
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1965735/posts