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“once you start adding or not adding social issues is when people get their undies tied in a knot.”

Correct, and that’s when the Conservative Caucus would split into as many factions as it is at the moment. Truly limited government will piss off many of the Christian voters who seem to be OK with a more intrusive government as long as those intrusions favor their agenda.
I’m not trying to be a Doom & Gloom guy, but what is becoming pretty obvious is that conservatives are not only a minority, we’re a pretty small minority. IMO the rest of American voters have moved leftward. I see some form of socialized medicine in our future. I think it’s too late to turn the clock back and reverse this. The best we can do now is to try to lessen the impact, and I’m not sure we can even do that. As a group we tend to be pretty rigid. Like another poster said we don’t do group think very well. That seems to imply that each faction will continue to happily turn its guns on the other factions when their litmus test, whatever it happens to be, isn’t met.

first step would be in describing the basic tenets of conservatism, which to me are sound financial policy and limiting government....a strong defense.... once you start adding or not adding social issues is when people get their undies tied in a knot.

Herein lies the problem with all of this talk (this thread being just one example) of trying to create a large-scale "conservative" movement, whether within the GOP or as a 3rd party -- everyone has their own definition of what "conservative" means, and trying to come up with a common enough definition to please everyone will result in something so vague as to really not mean much.

I think a better focus is on the more immediate problem and issue: American government is broken. It would be a much better use of effort, in my opinion, to push issues aside for the moment, and instead work on developing a guideline for what the appropriate role of government is, at each level and branch of government. The first priority after that would be to develop plans and policies to reallocate and restore the proper functions of government.

What is the proper role of the federal government? What is the proper role of the state governments? What is the proper role of county and local governments? There needs to be a unified approach to these questions that puts the responsibility and authority (but no more!) at the appropriate levels. As far as determining the role, the general guideline should be "what is the lowest level of government necessary to do the job?", as government that is closer to the problem, and the people it serves, is most responsive.

Within each level of government, and at that level, the proper functions of various branches and agencies can be determined as well. For example, at the federal level, each of the three branches has their own specific roles to play.

This type of approach should appeal to most of the folks who call themselves "conservatives", and certainly economic and defense conservatives, as well as a large number of libertarians (minus the anarchists posing as libertarians). What I worry about are the subset of conservatives (typically "social" conservatives^*) who would have no problem with big government, as long as it does what they want.

^* - By no means do I want to imply that all, or even most, social conservatives fit this mold. But "big government" conservatives do tend to be social conservatives, more often than not.

Once the framework for fixing government is in place, then it would be more reasonable to focus more heavily on issues. But I really do believe that a government that is reined in and brought back to its proper role would likely act much more conservative by default, anyway.