If Reagan Tolerated GOP Moderates, Why Can’t Today’s Conservatives?

His example of Oympia Snowe as a moderate undermines his argument.

Yep, obviously any old Reagan “official” who follows Hussein's cult is useless to us.

All that happened is Specter jumping ship because he couldn’t win a primary,

I think the author has got it exactly backwards and if he is listening to his advice will bring destruction to the Republican Party, the conservative movement, and the great experiment of the American democracy. Here is a post that I submitted some time ago.

The "big tent" scenario simply does not work on a practical level. People will not come into your tent no matter how big it is and how welcoming you might be to any bizarre political philosophy if you cannot attract them with compelling core principles. Here is a portion of a post which I published immediately after the election in response to a Politico article calling for Republicans and conservatives to move left to fill the big tent:

As we conservatives drag the remnants of our movement into the wilderness with no idea how we will emerge or whether we will ever emerge as an electoral force in America which is recognizable by my generation, we must inevitably engage ourselves in the most soul- searing inquiry of what went wrong. This will be an agony but equally it will be effective only to the degree that it hurts. It will not succeed without bloodshed. There must be finger-pointing and bloodletting. We must carve to the bone. The process must be Darwinian. Those whose ideas are false must be bayoneted on the trail.

The object is to find our soul - nothing less. In a come to Jesus sense we must get absolutely clear what it means to be a conservative. Only at this point do we look to the tent flaps and open them. Those who cannot subscribe to the hard-won consensus, to a confession of faith as to what is a conservative, should walk out through that flap. Those who are attracted from the outside to the core message of conservatism should be encouraged to walk through the flap and enlarge the tent. What the left wants us to do is to expand the census in the tent prematurely and thus turn a movement into a menagerie. The Soul-searching must be conducted by conservatives without the earnest ministrations from liberals like those of Politico. This article, of course, has nothing whatever to do with explaining why Republicans lost 2008 election across the board, it has everything to do with first efforts by the left to sabotage the rebuilding process on the right which must be done exclusively by the right.

We have not lost the 2008 election because we were excessively partisan while Obama was enlightened and transcendental. We actually lost the election because George Bush and Karl Rove betrayed the soul of conservatism. A party without its soul is like an army which does not believe in itself, it cannot win the next contest. A party which had abandoned its principles and so lost the last two elections and frittered away both its power as the ruling coalition and its status as the majority philosophy of the nation, cannot expect to swell its ranks by recruiting to a lost cause. The party must first know what the cause is and only then can it recruit. To again borrow the military analogy, a party like an army disintegrates without a mission. Armies are assigned missions but a political party finds its mission only through soul-searching.

As this process occurs we will be told by the left that only a big tent party can win and that to become a big tent one must move to co-opt the center. That is not how it works. That is the reverse of the way it works. The center is not peopled by voters with fixed notions about the exercise of power who wait for one of the great political parties to surrender their values and embrace the tempered and resolute opinions of the middle. That happens with splinter parties but not with the mushy middle. When an unaffiliated voter bestirs himself to enter the polling booth he is confronted with one of two options: right or left. He does not consider who has moved the farthest geographically from right to the left or left to right any more than he commits because of his own long held political beliefs. He votes for the fella who best tickles his fancy at the moment. Put more charitably, he votes for the candidate who persuades that he is the best, and has the best to offer.

If we as conservatives do not believe that we have the best to offer we should get out of the business. A candidate, like a party, who is centered on his philosophy has integrity and is persuasive. And that philosophy must first have a vertical spiritual component which finds expression and out working in a horizontal governing philosophy.

Because of his race, Obama was asked only to demonstrate that he could walk and talk like a president. Obama has won the middle, not because he pandered to them, which he did, but because he had the wind at his back.

As John McCain reverts from titular head of the Republican Party to United States Senator, it falls to the rest of us to contrive a governing philosophy which he, unfortunately, did not own and therefore could not bequeath to us. We had such a legacy from Ronald Reagan but we squandered it. We must construct our own. We must do it in the wilderness. We must do it unaided by intermeddling liberals. Their's is the serpent's way, the easy way, a pander to the superficially popular, the accommodation to the middle. The bed of birth has always been a bed of pain. The pain must be embraced if we are to receive a new life.

All I hear lately is that GOP has gone too far right? Why is no one questioning if the Democratic Party has gone too far to the left?

Because the GOP then was in a position of strength and therefore was self-assured. The feckless leadership of the past decade has left the GOP is a position of weakness and insecurity. Weak and insecure people fly off the handle easily.

GOP Moderate

That's pronounced: Murder-it

My answer to the question is that moderate/centrist Republicans are destroying the Party. The last election should show everyone that moderate candidates did not win elections. What more do you need?

George W. Bush is not conservative. Neither is John McCain in my view. There are moderates in the Party who are in fact Democrats. Now we are told that the Republican Party has to reach out. Reach out for what? Minorities?

You can reach out til your arm falls off and you are not going to get the black vote. Blacks are taught that the Democratic party is their only defense against white people who would really like to put them back into slavery. They are taught that crap from the minute they enter sub-standard public schools by brainwashed teachers who only know enough themselves to spread leftist poison.

Of course Democrats want Republicans to be more moderate. They won’t ever support a moderate Republican though. They see what people like Specter and Snow and Collins do to the Republican Party. They would be very stupid not to want more of those turncoats.

Arlen Specter’s defection says little about the GOP and much more about Specter himself, whom liberal Jonathan Chait referred to as an “unprincipled hack.” Nevertheless, Specter’s move across the aisle has intensified the conversation over ideological purity in the Republican Party and set off a bitter debate among conservatives and moderates over tactics and strategy.

He just undercut his own argument. This isn't about "tolerating" moderates, because:
1. We did tolerate Specter for decades while he continued to betray us every time it mattered.
2. In the end, Specter left us. So, who's not tolerating who?
3. So now the question has to be, what exactly are we getting in return for tolerating these "unprincipled hacks"?
4. And who could blame us for asking? We aren't betraying them, it is they who betray us and their supposed principles.
5. And if you're a Republican, but you don't believe in "first principles", exactly what is it that attracts you to the party? If you repeatedly vote with the Democrats, exactly why do you not join the Democratic Party? If you don't believe in "first principles" then what do you believe in, and why should we support you? We've done more than tolerate them, we keep voting them into office. The question is "why"?

Rick, why don’t you ask the Democrats what they do with their moderates? I mean, look what happened to Lieberman, Zell Miller, Casey Sr, etc. There are core issues that just cannot be compromised, like abortion and border security. BTW, Moran uses Kemp as an example for his support of amnesty. Of course conservatives would have drummed Kemp out of the party (today). How can you support free-market policies that will inevitably be distorted by illegal aliens? Conservative values is moderate, it is the middle of the road, it is centrist. Why should conservatives have to compromise all the time?

You’re on a roll today.

Specter was not a moderat republican. He was a liberal republican. He was an old rockerfellerite who hated tax cuts, and supported abortion, unions and the minimum wage.

All I hear lately is that GOP has gone too far right? Why is no one questioning if the Democratic Party has gone too far to the left?

Because the leader of the Dems is charismatic, just like Reagan was. Reagan "tolerated" but smiled and welcomed everyone.People were willing to accept Reagan because of his warmth and ability to communicate with everyone, even his enemies. He never wavered on his principles just as Obama isn't. The two men were ideological opposites but but their personalities have/had similar effects.

That is a good way to put it! Romney and the rest are jumping the shark bad.

I have found you need two things to roll: 1) a knee operation that locks you to the front of your computer. 2) Dragon NaturallySpeaking voice recognition software which permits you to blather on without fear of carpal tunnel syndrome.

1. Because moderates haven’t exactly been paragons of tolerance toward the right themselves. That particular door swings both ways.

2. Because it’s frankly irritating to be lectured on growing the party and leading it back to power by people who’d be better advised to worry about rebuilding their own section of it.

I tolerate moderate GOP voters, but not RINO candidates.

I’m putting on my flame-retardant underwear for this one:

First, I should state that I am a hard-core conservative. That said, I just don’t think we can win any elections by running “moderates” out of the party. Conservatives just don’t make up a majority portion of the electorate. Regan was able to attract moderates while still maintaining his conservative message. We need a charismatic leader that can do the same (and we need to stop running these so-called moderates at the top of the ticket). Regan was staunchly anti-abortion, but yet did not run on an abortion plank - and did not change the law much once he got in. As unfortunate as this was, it was one of many moderate issues he did not go out of his way to change - and what maintained his appeal to the middle of the pack and the Blue Dogs.

I think this is why Palin is such an attractive candidate. I suspect she will run as a conservative, but yet with her charisma attract moderates who aren’t afraid of too many issues being bowled over that they care about.

If we become a conservative party only, we will expect no better results than the libertarians in future elections.

Flame away.

Great post. Wish I could write like that.

Adding this gem to my file on “Great Moderates” of the GOP! Puking out loud!