First, gaining any degree of authority or power in the local power depends on doing some work. You can make thousands of ranting posts on FR and other places saying how much you hate liberals, RINO's, etc., but none of those posts give you any credibility in gaining real influence. Real influence comes from doing the hard work of campaigning. If you want to have credibility at the local level, you have to make the phone calls and knock on the doors at election time. Both of those activities can be extremely frustrating. To win votes for your candidate, you have to learn not to insult people who don't believe quite the way you do. You have to listen to people who have no clue about the big picture but want to give a little speech about some issue that's important to them. You have to put up with people who are mad about something your candidate did or your party did and want to let loose their anger on someone who represents that candidate or party. You have to put up with people who are so apathetic and ignorant that they think you are a fool for becoming involved. These things are not fun, but if you want the party to listen, you have to be willing to do the work that's not much fun. If you think that you can just show up and launch the kind of rant that some people launch around here, you're going to be ignored.
Secondly, when you start doing this work, you start to gain a little different perspective. You come to respect people who aren't as ideologically pure as you are but who are willing to do the work to keep liberals out of office. You lose some respect for those armchair warriors whose commitment to conservative principles lasts only as long as their fingers are on the keyboard and their butts are in their desk chairs.
Thirdly, you come to see that effectiveness in many elective offices is a matter of competence rather than ideology. Anyone can rant for a few minutes, but not everyone can sit through the meetings, pay attention to the facts that bear on an issue, and find reasonable solutions. Electing someone who is ideologically pure but becomes an incompetent joke in office does not advance conservatism.
Bill
A perfectly reasonable post from your perspective, which I know is based in experience.
However, the other side of the coin is that “they made the trains run on time” is not an acceptable view of decent politics.
Besides, it’s not an either/or question. There is not a reason on God’s green earth that we can’t have principled AND competent people in elected office.
Bill,
I enjoyed your comments. Precinct work is tiring and frustrating at times. But, the real battle is in who is running the operation - who populates the district party committee. Are they competent, or is the organization a mess ideologically - which usually means the organization isn’t being effective at its precinct responsibilities.