[Torie]

You do know the Pubbies have to win primaries to get to the general election don't you? What you need to do is persuade a majority of Pubbie primary voters to abandon their pragmatic moderate centrist conservatism, or get the center of gravity of the nation as a whole in politics move your way. Absent that, one is just a rather ineffectual and whining kibbitzer.

As a matter of full disclosure, in general I am a "pragmatic moderate centrist conservative," by temperment and ideology, although it depends on the issue (on a few, I am close to a right wing nutter, on a few others shockingly "liberal"). So you need to take over the party from my type I guess to achieve political happiness. Fair enough. Just go do about doing it. You send your check, and I send mine. And so it goes.

[FreeReign]

You do know the Pubbies have to win primaries to get to the general election don't you? What you need to do is persuade a majority of Pubbie primary voters to abandon their pragmatic moderate centrist conservatism, or get the center of gravity of the nation as a whole in politics move your way. Absent that, one is just a rather ineffectual and whining kibbitzer.

You would actually blame the mind-set of the general electorate instead of actually blaming the mindset of the R politicians? How...how conservative of you.

Others here would instead expect to see a conservative politician luck-out and get elected -- god knows how -- and have that conservative politician lead the centrist-to-statist minded electorate to freedom.

[Romulus]

Thanks for that thoughtful reply, but IMO in defining the problem in terms of who's controlling the party you implicitly accept the notion that the Party is a permanent fixture of the political landscape. But I put it to you that you're confusing the container with the thing contained: the Party exists only so long as it's deemed useful by those whose support it solicits. It's nowhere written that parties must survive in perpetuity, with factions contending for their control. This is how apparatchiks think, but the rest of us understand that a party is a temporary convenience that can wither and disappear, and sometimes should.

Perhaps GOP operatives would like the right wing to hang around and agitate for more control. It's a calculated gamble on their part -- being professional political creatures, their hope and yours is not so much philosophical as practical: how to survive and prosper past the next election. As private citizens, such priorities are of scant interest to ordinary conservatives. We're not out in search of power -- just looking for someone to protect us from it.

It seems that power-seeking technocrats have subordinated their constitutional role as citizens, to a professional concern, a book-clearing calculus of locating and efficiently pairing off the buyers and sellers of political power, while taking care to retain the standard commission for themselves.