But, over time, if the people want a centerleft government they will have it. So long as government does not intrude much of their affairs, most citizens, if not most voters, are content to let the government proceed unsupervised providing it takes only small bites. I think the genius of democracy is not that we avoid mistakes but that we correct them before the harm is mortal. Thus, we save the Republic from the huge mistakes of the Carter years by voting for Ronald Reagan. The Electorate is reactive, not really pro active. It bestirs itself to correct mistakes with much more energy than it employs in exploring a brave New world.
The point is that an effective politician understands the limitations of citizen involvement and works within the envelope. This brings me to your second point which is that sugar is always better than better than vinegar, a truth which Ronald Reagan never forgot. But neither did Reagan compromise his message, although he clearly sugarcoated it. There is a difference between campaigning with clarity and campaigning with malice. Immediately after the last election, I wrote this post which bears on the subject:
We have not lost the 2008 election because we were excessively partisan while Obama was enlightened and transcendental. We actually lost the election because George Bush and Karl Rove betrayed the soul of conservatism. A party without its soul is like an army which does not believe in itself, it cannot win the next contest. A party which had abandoned its principles and so lost the last two elections and frittered away both its power as the ruling coalition and its status as the majority philosophy of the nation, cannot expect to swell its ranks by recruiting to a lost cause. The party must first know what the cause is and only then can it recruit. To again borrow the military analogy, a party like an army disintegrates without a mission. Armies are assigned missions but a political party finds its mission only through soul-searching.
As this process occurs we will be told by the left that only a big tent party can win and that to become a big tent one must move to co-opt the center. That is not how it works. That is the reverse of the way it works. The center is not peopled by voters with fixed notions about the exercise of power who wait for one of the great political parties to surrender their values and embrace the tempered and resolute opinions of the middle. That happens with splinter parties but not with the mushy middle. When an unaffiliated voter bestirs himself to enter the polling booth he is confronted with one of two options: right or left. He does not consider who has moved the farthest geographically from right to the left or left to right any more than he commits because of his own long held political beliefs. He votes for the fella who best tickles his fancy at the moment. Put more charitably, he votes for the candidate who persuades that he is the best, and has the best to offer.
If we as conservatives do not believe that we have the best to offer we should get out of the business. A candidate, like a party, who is centered on his philosophy has integrity and is persuasive.
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