I'm a conservative. I didn't stay home. If Kenneth Blackwell wasn't conservative enough for conservatives, then who would have been? I think it's a shame that some good candidates were defeated in the fall because the some of the base didn't turn out to vote.
And I am worried about next year. If the cut-and-run conservatives decide to stay home again because the Republican candidate for president isn't ideologically pure enough for them, we could end up with Hillary or Obama as president. And frankly, I don't see how that is going to help the country or the Republican party.
If conservatives want to leave the Republican Party, they need to start building a grass-roots third party in all 50 states. They can't sit on their rear ends between election cycles and then complain that Republicans aren't conservative enough, so they're staying home or voting for some third party candidate, who might get 1% of the vote. For the time being, the Republican Party is conservatives' best hope for getting elected and influencing policy at the local, state, and federal level.
That being said, I still don't believe in supporting Giuliani as the answer. I believe, as many of my friends cut from the same cloth, that supporting someone just because they have a nominal R after their name is going to work out. I think we can do better.
I have been criticized before, and will be again, but I am standing fast trying to pull the party back to the right. And I will spend many hours trying to do that on a precinct level. I do not believe third party has the ooomph to make it.
In God We Trust.....Semper Fi