[GBA]

I agree with Jefferson and see the tendency of many to believe they must win everyone on everything or they lose. That's never been the case, not even in the days of our revolution was there such agreement.

A party is at best a loose collection of groups who can agree on, if not an ideology, then at least agree on enough to WIN THE ELECTION.

While everyone can agree that winning the election is a goal, it is not the goal of those individuals in those individual goals per se, merely the means to those individual goals.

Trouble is, there are so many competing goals each at odds with one another that you have no party, no banner and will win no elections, not until they raise something principled to rally around and fight for.

It's been done before and easily could be done again. On paper, the republicans should clean house in any election against an obama, especially after four years of his policies.

Like I said, there is no shortage of issues and problems, just agreed upon principles. Regan found them, stayed on message and won two landslides, so it can be done.

[ex-snook]

"Like I said, there is no shortage of issues and problems, just agreed upon principles. Regan found them, stayed on message and won two landslides, so it can be done. "

True but Reagan did not export the jobs of the working man. He won with Reagan democrats.

[muawiyah]

Goldwater used to preach that there was no moderate center ~ he still looked at politics as a left/right thing in two dimensions though ~ with two nodes. I took that idea and expanded it into a three dimensional model that revealed it to be a bi-modal saddle. That allowed or incorporation of disparate factions into the same party!

I don't know if mine was an originalthought, but my modelworks.

Goldwater, one of a handful of good political theoreticians in the last couple of centuries also convinced Johnson of his view so instead of LBJ going to the middle for voters, he lurched all the way over into Republican territory and picked up a faction, to wit, the 25% of the black vote Democrats hadn't gotten during the Depression ~ kept it too! He realized that you didn't need to go after broad masses with ideology, just specific factions with policy decisions.

Nixon took that to heart and did the same ~ he went after a major Democrat bulwark ~ white male Democrats in Southern states ~ and brought them permanently into the Republican party.

Ronald Reagan did just about the same with church going Roman Catholics!

Obama didn't quite do that, but the Democrat party pushed big time for voter registration ~ risking violating the law wholesale ~ and got enough new legitimately registered voters to beat McCain like an old rug!

No factions moved!

Currently we have an unemployed 'faction' that's up for grabs. Mitt ignored them ~ he lost. Obama also ignored them ~ he lost several million voters. The Democrats saw that. What are we doing about it? This is a core FDR constituency and it's ours to grab with nothing more than a promise of employment!