[gatorbait]

Is Bush a conservative? No. Should he try to be? Apparently that course of action neither appeals to him, nor does he calculate it would be beneficial in the long run, to himself or the mushy American Moderate lobbies.

I agree that Bush is not a conservative in the Pat Buchanan nativist mold, true. Heck,I don't think Ronald Reagan was either.You hit on the single most important point I have attempted to make here; that the middle,vast and squishy, has no desire to be preached to by ideological firebrands. It worked against Dean in the end and worked against Goldwater and Newt. I'll go beyond the middle lobbies and go into the middle voter. They are not engaged, they do not explore and they do not have the fire we see here or even on DU.

The immigration proposal , flawed as it is , is an opening , not an ends. Unfortunately, those who run in the hate Bush circles on the right cannot seem to differentiate this .The Lefties can; they just lie about it.

Your points about both Medicare and the economy are lost on the rigid, blinkered ideologues who cannot ,out of ignorance or spite, not see that this is a long term strategy ,again a fault of the Right, We want it now and each time we do this, we get it haneded back to us.Look at Clinton's masterful neutering of Gingrich. It does not matter in the end if Newt was right, it matters he was perceived, in the great middle, as wrong. By the time it was proven otherwise, it was too late. We know the Left believes in gradualism in this culture and we have to realize that is what works. I realize that you,others who see this and understand it, and I will be hammered and flamed by the eternally adolescent whom you so well described and who continue to marginalize themselves. Unfortunately, their screeching marginalizes the movement, and that,is the greatest sin of all. Conservatism really works,but in your face attacks do not draw the middle closer;it repels them.Think of the Abortion debates, Screaming, abusive crowds earned the pro life movement a RICO violation. It was our own fault.When clinic bombings and doctor killings are hailed, and publicized, that ensures the general public will look at us like trogladytes.Add to that mix the control of the enterainment media by the Left and you have a perfect villian for slick propaganda pieces beamed into homes nightly.

This was a tad wordier than I intended, but you and I, and I'd like to believe, the rational amongst us, realize that politics is not perfection.

[FairOpinion]

One thing that many "radical conservatives" (as Reagan called them) ignore is that Bush is not omnipotent. He is doing what's possible, and work on priorities. He can't wave a magic wand to suddenly enact 100% of the conservative agenda.

The "radical conservatives" are the "all or nothing types", they rather have Dean, than to have a great deal, but not all of the conservative agenda enacted all at once.

They also fail to realize, that politics is the art of deals, Bush needs to make deals with the Dems in some areas, to get his way in important other areas, such as the War on Terror, taxcuts, and so on, for which theses so-called conservatives also don't give him credit.

And let me repost yet again Reagan's own words:

""When I began entering into the give and take of legislative bargaining in Sacramento, a lot of the most radical conservatives who had supported me during the election didn't like it.

"Compromise" was a dirty word to them and they wouldn't face the fact that we couldn't get all of what we wanted today. They wanted all or nothing and they wanted it all at once. If you don't get it all, some said, don't take anything.

"I'd learned while negotiating union contracts that you seldom got everything you asked for. And I agreed with FDR, who said in 1933: 'I have no expectations of making a hit every time I come to bat. What I seek is the highest possible batting average.'

"If you got seventy-five or eighty percent of what you were asking for, I say, you take it and fight for the rest later, and that's what I told these radical conservatives who never got used to it."