As Rush said Wednesday, we have three conservatives in the race, Cain, Santorum and Bachmann, make your choice. Any of the three are better than obummer.
Newt has always been famous enough to be the front-runner.
There was a reason why he wasn’t the front-runner. He was dismissed immediately this spring/summer when he announced, mostly simply on the basis of global warming.
Santorum does have a very purist Social Conservative resume, and Iowa, specifically, does have purist Social Conservatives, and a solid resume with very little embarassing or stupid on it. Bachmann, Cain and Perry (a pretend Conservative) have a bunch of very questionable marks on their resume. Santorum really doesn’t. There’s really only so far the “didn’t support Toomey” attack can go. Gingrich had no reason to get involved in the Dede election. No one really wanted to know what he thought, there. Santorum was expected to get involved, and it was clear that he was between a rock and a hard place with that one.
Ron Paul has Old-fashioned foreign policy conservativism. There are very few Old-fashioned foreign policy conservatives any more. Most “conservatives” today are happy with the Bush/Clinton/Bush/Obama foreign policy. They note that Ron Paul’s foreign policy is different from the BCBO foreign policy, which they call “conservative”.
Cain didn’t have a problem describing what he would’ve done in Libya. Cain had a problem describing what he would do different from Obama. Because you really have to be a true foreign policy scholar to describe the differences between the “Liberal” foreign policy and the “Conservative” foreign policy. And Cain isn’t a true foreign policy scholar. Not saying that’s a bad thing, it just means that the same people will continue with the same foreign policy whether it’s Obama or Cain or Romney.
Ron Paul’s foreign policy is clearly different and many who like BCBO foreign policy think Ron Paul’s foreign policy isn’t conservative. BCBO all took much more military intervention than Reagan did, for example.
Anybody see Paul Wolfowitz calling Bush “conservative” at the debate? Uh huh.