But George Bush was running in 2004, and he is a "perfect" candidate on the social issues - abortion, gay marriage, 2nd amendment. And he's a religious man himself, a good family man.
the point is - that man, with a maximum turnout effort in 2004 amongst social conservatives - won by one state. He didn't win in a landslide, he won by one state.
Tell me how we do better then Bush 2004? Go further right? There aren't any untapped pools of voters further to the right, not that I see. So we have two choices:
- we can try to repeat the 2004 election model, but I'm telling you that two demographic trends are working against us for 2008 - Hispanics and Generation Y. We also have another drag on us in 2008, "Bush fatigue" - high negatives on iraq for example, are making independents less likely to vote republican. so we need some ideas on how to overcome that.
- we can try and get a candidate who can do better amongst independents, to whom the social issues are not paramount voting issues. The razor's edge - can we do that without alienating a larger portion of the base then we get from the middle.
It's worth pointing out that Bush received a whopping 11.6 million more votes in 2004 over 2000 (more than Reagan's increase of 10.6 million from '80 to '84). Only Richard Nixon from '68 to '72 netted a larger increase in the voter turnout. Kerry performed only 8 million above Gore. 2004 was still an extraordinarily polarizing election, egged on by the media hate and the plethora of BDS moonbats. Sadly, we're now in a phase where most of the states are "locked in" with whom they'll support in a Presidential election, and so now it's about maximizing your base supporters to make sure you carry those base states. For Republicans now, campaigning in states like NY or CA (or even IL) are exercises in futility. You might manage to carry a decent number of Congressional districts in those states, but the urban moonbat areas override the desires of the mainstream voters of the rest of those states.
I've had this discussion online over the past 9 years, how do we increase our share of the vote ? What do we do ? Well, firstly, whatever you do, you cannot afford to piss off the base, bedrock voters of the party. Trying a tack where you downplay certain issues (or nominate candidates that are obviously hostile to those issues that the base cares about), is a recipe for disaster. Will you pick up some more independent voters with those candidates ? Quite possibly, yes. But you will stand to lose far more base voters.
Let's look at Giuliani, for example. Giuliani is a social policy Democrat. How will the base react to his nomination ? Easy, it will cause a serious rift and depress turnout in a number of key states (such as mine, which is now a solid GOP state at the Presidential level), and cause a 3rd party Conservative candidate to rise. At best, you may increase support for him in some suburban areas in the Northeast, but what you'll lose elsewhere will be considerable.
As we know, we're in a very polarizing period, and there aren't any clear-cut answers as to how to move things more in our direction. I believe that we lost serious focus with our Congressional majority (indeed, it was my Senator that was the former Majority Leader, and I believed he was utterly incapable of performing the duties of that job) and we forgot WHY we were sent there in the first place. In a lot of ways, we lost our cajones with the first government shutdown under Clinton, scarcely a year into our majority. Had we stood up fully to him at that point, and unapologetically so, I believe we'd be at a different point today. Too much we've allowed the 'Rats to dictate to us, instead of the other way around, and now they're back in charge again. We need to stop acting like battered wives and take control of the agenda, and that includes the President. These folks are on the wrong side of the issues, and the President should use that effectively (just as Clinton did at a point where he looked like he was a one-termer, which reinvigorated his Presidency), but I'm not seeing that.
I should add, too, that I'm a Conservative first. I have no use for the party once it starts moving in a leftist, Democrat-lite (or heavy) direction. The country will similarly have no need for the party if it is a me-too party (witness that by the 1960s, absent the Goldwater Revolution, the party was on track to becoming a moribund one -- in fact, I doubt the party would've survived into the 1980s before a separate new Conservative party would pop up). I've always found it remarkable that after Conservative ideals are the winners in practice, the ideology that brings the most prosperity and freedom to the people, we're trying to move leftwards into an ideology that enslaves, restricts, and oppresses.
We need fearless people, unafraid to go into those "hostile" areas and say, "Hey, this is what I stand for, this is what I believe in, and this is what will make us a stronger and better nation." That's what Reagan did, and he carried areas of the country that are almost unimaginable today. It can be done again, with the right person. Bush has some personal liabilities in that he has never been a great communicator and doesn't have strong charisma. Sadly, for some, they need to see a person with those qualities before they support them, no matter what they stand for.