I see no yardage gained in running candidates who have the right message but obviously can’t win. We need to run candidates who can win and have the right message. We have to understand that in politics you can’t effect any changes unless you win office. I’m not saying abandon principles, but run candidates who are smart, effective campaigners, and have the most winnable conservative message.
As lousy as this election turned out, I will not forget the idiocy of the last national election where we threw away two perfectly winnable Senate seats (Missouri and Indiana) because we ran candidates who couldn’t keep their stupid mouths shut when they were obviously being set up for a trap by the ‘Rats. Instead, we got two extremely liberal ‘Rat Senators from what otherwise would be conservative (Indiana) or moderate-conservative (Missouri) midwestern states. How much did that help us in the Senate this session?
Agreed. You have to be able to win, first and foremost. Find the most conservative candidate that can win - and we should be fielding them everywhere. In urban areas that will include a lot of candidates none of us here would particularly like, but you have to start somewhere. As I pointed out previously, there are a lot of stubborn purists that would have refused to nominate a guy like Giuliani for Mayor of NYC. Yes, he's bad on the social issues, but he's good in most other areas and really turned NYC around and was a great success. Do I want to run him for President? No. Was he a great Republican mayor? You bet.
We have to understand that in politics you can’t effect any changes unless you win office.
There are a lot of purists that don't ascribe to that school of thought. They'd rather lose forever, than compromise at all and actually win. These are the people that think if you just keep pounding the same principled drum your bound to eventually be victorious. They apparently don't look at places like Detroit, DC, deep blue states, other countries to see that populations will sometimes vote for the same party, no matter how bad things get, for decades and decades on end - simply because they identify your party as the greater enemy.
I will not forget the idiocy of the last national election where we threw away two perfectly winnable Senate seats (Missouri and Indiana) because we ran candidates who couldn’t keep their stupid mouths shut
Add goofball Christine O'Donnell, Sharon Angle, Linda McMahon in previous elections to that list of doomed losers in states we should have won. I actually think Murdoch was worth a shot in Indiana. I had no idea what a bad candidate he'd turn out to be. Akin was an idiot who was openly supported in the primaries by the Democrats because they knew he had foot-in-mouth disease.