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Yes, I live in California, and I understand California culture quite well. I'm not sure what the qualifications for a "liberal" Republican are. It's pretty subjective word.

I get the sense from the "purists" that a "liberal" is anyone who is not a purist conservative like themselves.

The reason why California Republicans do so poorly is because the purists are not team players. The Republican party can learn a lot from the Democrats. They have been so successful in advancing liberalism because they adhere to 3 simple pragmatic principles for long-term victory:

1. advance their agenda incrementally.
2. hide behind "moderation" to increase their power, then unleash their agenda once they have it.
3. obstruct the Republican agenda when they are out of power.

Republicans don't understand that politics is just like football. You play offense only when you have the ball, and you play defense when you don't. Republicans seem to have it exactly backwards. Right now Republicans in California need to be playing defense. The conservatives get way too ambitious when they ought to just be concentrating on preventing forward motion by the Democrats. They go deep when they don't even have the ball. Meanwhile the Democrats have an open field with no one even covering them.

I'm not so ambitious myself. I don't need a purist conservative to run against the Barbara Boxers of the world. My philosophy is that replacing someone like Barbara Boxer with someone who votes with the GOP even once in the Senate is forward motion by comparison. Someone who simply didn't obstruct the President's judicial nominees is someone who is a step up from Boxer. Someone who took a vote away from a Democrat filibuster is someone worthwhile sending to the Senate.

You ignored most of what I said and made up the rest. If you know anything about politics, you would realize NO Republican, anywhere on the spectrum, will win with terrible organization.

The purist stuff is just bunk. And you obviously don't know what the democrats do, because they don't do what you said. For example, they won't let any pro-life candidate run at all. They turned down an ideal young hispanic candidate is Southern California, who could self-finance, just because he didn't meet their abortion litmus test.

The reason why California Republicans do so poorly is because the purists are not team players.

First of all, I'm not sure what the qualifications for a "purist" Republican are. It's pretty subjective word.

Secondly, the moderate and conservative Republicans are not the ones who fail to be team player. Give me an example. I can give you many where the left-leaning Republicans are not the team player. Tom Campbell ran against Konnyu in the 80s, then he got full support in the general. But no one was allowed to run against him.

In 2002, I called my county central committee to volunteer. I was told not to bother promoting Bill Simon, to concentrate on Bruce McPherson.

In 2002, Simon beat Riordan in the primary. He lost by less than 5%, which could have been closer if Riordan backed Simon and campaigned for him. Of course, Simon campaigned for and supported Schwarzenegger in 2003. Simon would also have gotten a lot closer if the CRP had actually supported him in 2002. Instead, they took their ball and went home. Instead, the White House found out that top CRP officials started a group called "Republicans for Davis."

In 2002, McClintock lost the closest race in CA history, trying for controller. Did the party give 1 cent to their best chance for getting a statewide Republican in 2002. No, they'd rather have NO statewide Republicans than give him even a small contribution. That is really the best example. Think about it: if the CRP put just a bit of money in that race it wouldn't have been shut out in 2002. But no.

Riordan, the Godfather of left-leaning Republicans donated exclusively to Democrats. I can't find one Republican he donated to before 2003, but he was one of the top donors to Gray Davis, and also gave money to Feinstein, Boxer, John Burton, Maxine Waters, etc. He's the kind of team player we need more of, right?

Steve Poisner is now running for AD21 campaigning against President Bush.