If Toomey could not win a majority of the Republican primary vote, there is no way he could win a majority of Republican and Democrat votes.
If Toomey could have won, Bush would never have campaigned for Specter.
Toomey is a conservative. The Toomey campaign for the nomination made sure that every voter in PA knew that both Toomey and Rick Santorum were conservatives. As I predicted at the time that resulted in Specter being re-elected and Santorum being defeated at the next election.
Running as a conservative in PA only results in defeat. Santorum had been elected as a moderate and governed as a conservative. Defeating Santorum was apparently what Toomey and his supporters wanted most. Either that, or they are too ignorant of PA politics to even understand what it takes to win in a moderate dominated state like PA.
Then "Conservatives" who vote for Moderates are Moderates, not real Conservatives.
By that logic the only answer is that the Republicans should have lost in PA. If winning meant we had to put in a man who would vote for this evil monstrosity of a bill... we should have run the conservative and lost. You lead by showing your character. Spectre has none and only does our party damage when he is used as an example of a Republican. It’s that simple. This is out there in the black and white, right and wrong zone without much grey.
If more of these “moderates” as you call them will not vote for a real Republican, then they aren’t “moderates”. They are simply disinfranchised Democrats and havn’t been badly mugged enough by socialism to know better.
The time for fence straddling is ending. The fence is breaking under the weight of these “moderates”. Sides must be taken.
Better the enemy you know than the enemy you don’t know. If we can’t predict how Spectre will vote, or trust him to do the right thing when it is lit with a neon sign right in front of him then run him out of the party. His current actions make him incompatible with Republicanism. Better he be out of it and switch sides than give the enemy the ammo of being able to call everything they do “bipartisan” whenever Spectre votes with the Dems.
Say whatever you want about reality, this bill goes way beyond politics and right down to core beliefs. If he will vote for a freedom ending multi-trillion dollar power grab then it doesn’t matter one bit what party he calls himself. He’s a lib Democrat who happens to have an “R” after his name. He might as well get official and call himself one to make scorekeeping easier.
“An enemy stabs you in the back, a friend stabs you in the front.” - Which have these three Republican senators done? They have stabbed our party in the back in the most dire hour of need in a generation. They alone have the power to stall this pork bill up until it dies. They won’t do it. They are no friends of our party, or our country. Their mettle has been tested and they won’t stand up for us when times get tough.
Recall them now. Throw them out. Even if it means a Dem gets the seats. How can anyone respect our party or take our beliefs seriously if we allow this kind of garbage to infect the image we project to the entire country? The image we project to the very people we want on our side? The house we keep must be cleaner than it is now before we will begin to win over more voters.
The vote was 49/51%. Specter outspent Toomey by more than 300%. Specter had the full weight of the Whitehouse actively working on his behalf. You make it sound like he was soundly defeated -- he wasn't. IMO, support from Bush came precisely because they knew Toomey could win.
I would go so far as to say if he hadn't supported the specter and done his cyber-school thing he would have been run against 0boma instead of McHack.
If you say those views aren't valid fine but in my little conservative corner of Pennsylvania those are the thoughts.
Santorum didn't dance with the ones that brung him.
The result is the same except the Republican candidate is using Republican money and Conservative support to get into office so he can betray them.
I think in that case I would rather have the Donkey representing the voters than a RINO.
After this country has been raped pillaged and looted into the worst economic crisis since the 1930s, despite having Republicans run both houses of Congress and the presidency, are you still making that lame-ass argument?
A majority of Democrats means the country turns into a s***hole, everyone realizes what the problem is and we fix it.
A coalition of a minority of Democrats and a few RINOs means that the country turns into a s***hole, the Republicans get blamed, and the nation elects a super-majority of the same anti-American, socialists who got us into the mess in the first place, until there’s nothing left worth fighting about.
For God’s sake, how god-awful terrible does the nightmare have to be for you to stop spouting this inane drivel?
The truth is that people need to be led to redefine “moderate”.
Let’s face it, many liberals hide behind that label; they have more in common with N. Pelosi than with us.