“It’s a shame that the word “conservative” has to be qualified with “common-sense”.”
No. It is not. Words mean something. You can have a person who refuses to budge an inch. Reagan wanted a 30% tax cut in 1980. He campaigned on it. But he compromised in 1981 and got 25%. A doctrinaire, inflexible “conservative” could have taken the position that it was 30% or nothing.
Most genuine conservatives would, I think, favor a flat tax over the current system. A doctrinaire conservative would reject any tax reductions unless he got his way. And a flat tax is undeniably superior to a general rate cut because it defangs the IRS and is much more efficient and cheap for business and individuals. A common sense conservative would accept another form of tax reduction, if that was the best that could be done.
In 1976, Reagan selected Liberal Pennsylvania Senator Richard Schweiker as his running mate, infuriating doctrinaire conservatives. Although it was not altogether defensible as conservative (It wasn’t that bad in retrospect. Schweiker became more Conservative after 1976), it was a common sense move to preserve his chances at the nomination.
Jesse Helms, a great Senator was a doctrinaire conservative. Ronald Reagan was a common sense conservative. The actual differences were slight, and Reagan as President was more effective than Helms would have been, although Helms was the more unbending conservative.
Sometimes the difference between common sense and intellectual conservatives is no more than how they explain conservatism. In this sense Reagan was the quintessential common sense conservative and Bill Buckley would be the quintessential intellectual conservative. They both agreed on nearly everything, but they would explain it in different ways. Reagan would use stories, jokes, humor and pithy sayings, as does Palin. Some intellectuals never liked this about him. But most of them either got over it. Or they got run over by it.
A list of Reagan’s commonsense conservative wisdom is linked below:
http://www.reagansense.com/common-sense/
We will simply apply to government the common sense we all use in our daily lives.
-- Ronald Reagan, GOP convention acceptance speech, July 17, 1980