Posted on 02/07/2008 10:29:29 AM PST by Dane
Zot me if you wish, but after all the vitriol towards me on FR, the last two GOP candidates left are McCain and Huckabee, the irony was too good to pass up.
JMO, but a lot of Freepers acted like the left with their stern demand that every person must adhere to a 110% litmus test.
With now McCain's sealing up the nomination and blaming everyone else and their dog, maybe you all should look at yourselves, despite the claims of 20 million listeners or being a top web site, the results are in and your brand of conservatism is not selling where it counts, the GOP primaries.
It’d be funny if Huckabee continues winning more primaries, and upsetting McCain in some states. Many voters aren’t happy and might express it in various ways.
Go suck a sombrero!
I think we (meaning conservatives) should be discussing the conservative boni fides of various third parties and their candidates rather than harping to each other about McCain/Romney/Huckabee/Hillary/Obama. And FreeRepublic should be hosting that conversation and inviting all to attend and present their "case for conservatism".
The country survived eight years of Billary and we will survive four or eight years of Hillarbill or Obama _IF_ conservatives use that time to build a strong base in a new/different party, or a Republican party that "got the message" when we voted on principle rather than on politics in 2008. A party, new or changed, whose political philosophy is closer to that of Reagan, as well as the 1994 Republicans under Gingrich.
"Principled" means conservative first, Republican second. That's my opinion, your mileage may vary.
I think that the only good that will likely come from this is that after the press turns on McCain, and he loses badly in the general election, it may signal the end of his political career.
Hard to unite oil and water. The multicultural globalists who run the party have as their priority policies that are necessarily anathema to most of the base.
The most powerful elected official who really represents the base is Tom McClintock of California - and the ferocity with which the REPUBLICAN powers that be intervened to ensure that he would not be Governor there gives perspective on what we are up against. Instead, they installed Schwarzenegger, a man married into the Kennedy family, as liberal as any Democrat.
The powers that be in the Republican party have failed us utterly, and consistently... the phrase “a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism” comes to mind. The magnitude of malfeasance necessary to turn the historic opportunity of 1994 into the unmitigated disaster of 2008 must not only be corrected, it must be avenged, and measures must be put in place to ensure that it can never happen again.
There’s a FREEPER in my toilet????????
Oh oh.
Si se puede el Guapo...
My tenth FR anniversary is coming up in May. I voted for Ronald Reagan twice. I consider myself to be quite conservative. In fact, liberals who know my politics are worried that I'm mentally ill.
However, since the great purge in April 2007, I haven't been a "true conservative". I've challenged the "true conservatives" to show us what they've got when we started voting.
So, now we know. "True conservatives" are about 15% of the GOP primary electorate. They are zero percent of the independents and the Democrats.
So, nationally, "true conservatives" represent about 5% of the voters.
Now, I'm deliberately using the term "true" conservatives to describe a type of conservative - as we all know, for RR to win in a landslide twice took more than 5% of the voters.
The "trucons", to coin a phrase, have been talking much bigger than they vote. At 5% of the national electorate, about the only thing they can accomplish OUT of the GOP is to destroy the GOP nominee. Apparantly, that's going to happen.
I'm not sure what the answer is for the trucons. There are not enough of them to make demands on either major party. There are not enough of them to form a third force. I suppose, if they split off, the Democrat-Republican balance of power will revert to 1932-1980.
It's too bad, because the country remains basically conservative, and an actual truly conservative nominee could be elected President - as long as he wasn't more interested in reading other conservatives out of the coalition than he was in winning.
It's kind of like Christianity. I'm chairman of a small Christian school which accepts students from many different Christian traditions. Every once in a while, we get a family who becomes obsessed with the idea that other students, or some of the teachers, or Board members, "aren't Christians".
When you get to the bottom of this critique, in turns out that the number of "true Christians" (in their mind) is tiny, instead of huge. This self-defeating philosophy makes a broad-based Christian program, of any type, impossible.
So it is with the trucons. They've been barking out orders and making demands for a year. The primary election season has revealed that they are not influential enough to accomplish much, even by backing a fauxcon like Romney. Their future is unclear, as is the future of the GOP.
Which is kinda too bad, because for all its faults it did provide a home for a broad-based centre-right coalition which served the people better than the alternative would have done.
As we are about to find out.
Too much hubris.
His unexpected success early on seems to have gone to his head.
I think one of the main reasons he stayed in the election through Super Tuesday because of his strong dislike of Romney.
He may stick it out now just because if anything happens to McCain he might somehow win.
“Look at me everybody!”
Another President Klinton is just too much.
If you were to accept that as fact, which would you want to win the Democrat primary?
We haven't had our primary here in Ohio yet, so if I want I can vote in the Democratic primary instead of the Republican one which is pretty much over.
I'm just not sure which is the lesser of those two evils.
I will vote for McCain, but only if he asks a real conservative to be his running mate, someone like Haley Barbour or John Kasich. I will NOT vote for McCain if he asks Huckster to be his running mate. That is a promise.
lolol.. uhhh.. we live in strange times. :-}
I'd be happy with a 50% litmus test. McCain is borderline. Hunter/Thompson were 95%.
Get it?
I have never answered anyone like this on FreeRepublic but I will make an exception today. Your are ridiculous. Rush is the backbone of conservatism.
“The “trucons”, to coin a phrase, have been talking much bigger than they vote. At 5% of the national electorate, about the only thing they can accomplish OUT of the GOP is to destroy the GOP nominee. Apparantly, that’s going to happen.”
If the ‘trueCons’ are the 100% litmus test conservatives, then Ronald Reagan would *not* be a ‘true conservative’.
He wasn’t a litmus test conservative.
He supported prochoice Republicans against more liberal Democrats.
he compromised with Tip O’Niell and even raised taxes.
But he had core conservative principles and didnt shed while he engaged in practical politics.
We need a name for those non-litmus-test conservatives.
My name:
STRATEGIC CONSERVATIVE.
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