[kevkrom]

And my opinion of Cain continues to plummet. Taking the ball and going home isn’t going to fix anything. Conservatives have to fix the GOP from the inside if they want any chance of stopping liberalism — a third party merely entrenches the libs.

[JCBreckenridge]

Time to ditch the Whig party.

[stickywillie]

It appears to me that we have too many Conservatives in the Republican Primaries; they split the Conservative vote into several pieces, and leave the nomination to the rino. We need to have a “Conservative Only” Primary, and select one “1” Conservative to run in the Republican Primary. Doing that, we don’t water down the Conservative vote, and let the rino slip in.....

[Brookhaven]

The problem is the GOP pundits are already pushing the meme that the reason Romney lost was due to conservatives. Their solution: move the party to the left.

Think of this ruler as a political specturm.

This is where I would drop everyone on the spectrum:
0 - communism (China)
2 - current Democratic party
6 - George W Bush (yes, right in the center)
6.5 - Romney
8 - Reagan
11 - Founders like Jefferson (people underestimate how radical our founders were)
12 - Libertarians

The lesson the GOP will learn from this is election is to move to the left. In a few years the GOP platform will be around 5. We'll be country with a major liberal party (Democrats) and a major left of center party (Republicans). "Conservative" will come to mean "less liberal"; "Smaller government" will come to mean "not as big government"; and "individual freedom" will come to mean "freedom from worry" (instead of freedom to live as you wish).

That, in a nutshell, is the future of the GOP brand and the word "conservative". Both brands, imho, are beyond saving at this point. Propping up the GOP at this point just ensures more left of center government (and more crony capitalism, imho).

It may be time to chuck both the GOP and even the word conservative and refocus around some new ideas and symbols. The tea party was a good start. Maybe we should look at some of the language our founders used to describe themselves to find terms to describe ourselves and our goals.