If the goal of the tea party people is restoring a Constitutional smaller federal government, and they only focus on fiscal issues and enumerated powers it might be successful. Liberals love their own money, they do their best to keep it.
However it will be impossible to avoid wedge issues because there is money tied to them. They will have to deal with them.
There is no such thing as nice and neat politics, all compartmentalized and mutually exlusive to everyone’s idealistic enjoyment. Reality doesn’t happen that way.
What is going to happen is that alliances will form between tea party people and conservative democrats (for many dems, independents) and between republicans and various tea party people. More will be in common, in general, with tea party ideas and republican ideas.
You don’t jettison wedge issues though just because they’re difficult. If they are worth fighting for on principle and as part of a core philosophy (ie given everything else you believe it’s just common sense you’d be for or against a certain wedge issue) why run from it?
We are tired of people that try to please everyone. That is the thing we hate about Big Tent RINOs and false unity and the weird logic pretzels they wind up twisting themselves into. We love democrats trying to avoid questions and wriggle around because of this kind of stuff, we hate republicans who are like this and have no balls or guts to stand for something so they stay silent or worse.
Karl used “wedge issues” wrong.
Many of the arguments are taking place I think because people are using “wedge issues” differently.
“Wedge issues” are issues used to split the voters of the other party.
Talking about the craziest thing the Democrats have done is to use a “wedge issue”. You say to Democrat voters “your people did that, do you agree with that” You get the Democrat politician to talk about that crazy thing the Dems did. Put him or her on the spot. Get that Democrat talking about something that you know a sizable number of their voters won’t agree with.
One problem with using a wedge issue is that it’s not necessarily an important issue.
Also - issues and positions are different. Issues are what the candidate is spending time talking about, making tv commercials about, etc. Positions are the beliefs on any number of different things.
Keep conservative positions on abortion, gay marriage. Do not use abortion and gay marriage as issues.