Posted on 03/21/2013 1:51:56 PM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
An unsparing piece keying off the same Rick Perry soundbite at CPAC that inspired this post. Perry said that it’s unfair to blame conservatism for the GOP’s losses in 2008 and 2012 because, after all, our nominees weren’t conservative. Emery’s response: Then why did Republican primary voters vote for them instead of for a solid conservative like, say, Rick Perry?
Her answer? Between Reagan’s generation and the current crop of Rubio, Scott Walker, etc, there simply haven’t been many good conservative candidates.
Instead, against establishment types who were national figures, the conservative movement flung preachers and pundits (Pat Robertson, Alan Keyes and Pat Buchanan), has-beens and losers (New Gingrich and Rick Santorum), and others still worse (Herman Cain, for example), who on second thought lost even conservative primary voters.
To deny all this reality, some movement types invented a conspiracy theory. The Establishment met at the Country Club on alternate Tuesdays to undermine all the upcoming Reagans (who sadly enough never existed). This is untrue, and it keeps these movement types from facing the real problem — the failure of the conservative movement to find and develop successors to Reagan over the space of the past 20 years…...
(Excerpt) Read more at hotair.com ...
All we have to do is look at the Governor of Alaska, the most popular governor in America with approval numbers consistently in the 80s and reaching 93%, and she was known as effective and as a reformer, she was already one of the most interesting and accomplished females in American history with her biography and life style, and she could introduce youth, energy, vigor, and the face of a self made women with an American Indian family (all of her family including grandchild are tribal members, except her), and her handsome, athletic husband, as a rebranding of the staid old GOP.
So what happened when she was picked as the veep candidate? The GOP went crazy and turned into a pack of rabid wolves with prominent republican writers and columnists not only trying to destroy her, but actually endorsing and voting for the Democrats.
We always see this with conservatives, although never as dramatic as they did with Palin, for one thing in her case they had to react quickly or else she would become a Reagan like president within an election or two.
Cruz will never get equal standing with Rubio, and on and on.
Romney did not become the nominee because he is a brilliant politician, or had a message, or even had any place in GOP politics, he got there because he and the GOPe teamed together were an awesome force in shaping the presidential primaries for 6 years. The establishment is always an awesome force and they remove threats or at least weaken them, years in advance.
Additionally I wonder
Win what?
The ability to capitulate with someone identified as republican?
How might that help?
Principaled losses do help despite all the whining.
The culture must be led. It is currently pathological.
Why should anyone have to do that? Neither Romney, McCain, nor Dole won. That is tge standard. For this article to be right there couldn’t have been a conservative to do as well as that motley crew. About which I remain seriously dubious.
HotAir can go to hell. I recall they were pimping for Romney hard before the end of the primaries. Conservative candidates don’t get nominated because the GOPe does its best to undermine conservative candidates, as seen by the events of Bloody Thursday when Drudge, with the help of GOPe peons, unleashed false claims of Newt being an anti-Reaganite. We also saw this in their treatment of Palin.
It also doesn’t help that we have open primaries, thus allowing Rats to pollute the nomination process.
All of this deception, combined with an obsessive need to cover up the truth about Romney’s past, led to Mittens getting the nod.
You were S2, if I remember correctly. Maybe you’ll recall studies of Vaclav Havel, Lech Walenza and all, or not. Maybe we’ll do more of what is healthy, natural, moral and productive each year despite politics currently popular with the few who sturgeons of debt posing as big, bad bandwagons in political speech. Maybe that’s where the general situation is naturally going, this time without earthly design, Sir.
But then maybe having been a lowly enlisted type, digging lots of holes to sleep in and working temp jobs for decades, I’m only dreaming. Maybe I’m only dreaming, and none of this is really happening.
This is not the country that I grew up in. It’s been shut down to worthless activities by a lot of useless and spoiled people. How many of them would it take to change a transmission, build a house or index a gear, Sir?
IMO, we need old fashioned, real men in charge—not women who would print more funny money for public education and feminist domestic violence programs.
“Name the conservative candidate who could actually have won the election.”
All of them, except for the two Mormons, Ron Paul, and what’s-his-face.
Our candidate was the guy who invented ObamaCare. Go figure.
Yes, Reagan can be explained.
Being anti-Reagan post 1960s and during and after the Reagan Revolution, cannot be explained.
I would go with Scott Walker to begin with, over Cruz and Paul, for two reasons: (1) he has demonstrated strong executive ability in WI, especially in guiding "right to work" into being in the face of fierce opposition, and (2) the amount of hate that the Dems had for him would have resulted in any skeletons in his closet being exposed already.
The last time a Republican with only legislative experience and no exec experience (as either a governor, VP, cabinet secretary or general) won the presidency was Warren G. Harding.
The $ and promotion from the GOP/RNC goes to the moderates/elites/insider pukes.
The biggest problem is that most of these “conservative” candidates have major liberal issues
Look at the names bandied about now.... most of them have liberal ideas on major issues... like Amnesty, weak on national defense, continued big government spending, Globalism instead of Americanism, weak on terrorism, etc
Move the first primary to Texas.
What was so insane about it was that it’s not as if the Establishment had run with Solon and Cato in the past. They didn’t care if they were morons or criminals, so long as they toed the party line. I couldn’t help but have pictures of Bush the Younger flash in my head all through listening to a Krauthammer talk about Palin’s unpreparedness and hickitude. She was up against Biden, for liberty’s sake. His sole achievement has been sticking around for so long after his ambitions were stifled.
It isn’t as if Palin bucked progressive Pubism that much, either. I don’t remember her raising the specter of the “isolationism” implied to them by Rand Paul. Nor did she scare them by taking religion as seriously and openly as a Santorum—who by the way is every bit as Establishment as the next Pub, except that he emits an odor of religiosity obnoxious to liberal Pub noses different from Bush the Younger’s revival tent smell, which at least was useful for covering previous drunkenness, not for being Catholic, but for being too earnest, or something. She touched for indefinable reasons directly upon the conservative nerve. Though I’ve since grown tired of her (though not tired of looking at her), but she affected me at the time, too.
There’s something latent in the party waiting to burst forth. Call it the Reagan Factor. Not that Palin is a Reagan, but she appeals to the same part of us. This organ must be pried out by the Establishment. To them it is a cancer.
Bingo.
IMHO when economic collapase accelerates (and the welfare/funny money cannot continute forever), there will be a die off and those who do not want to participate in the die off will have to start working and taking responsibility for themselves and families.
Learn now, or learn the very, very hard way in a little while. Those are the two choices.
I agree with everything you said, except the implication that Newt is conservative in any meaningful sense. Moreso than Romney, maybe. Certainly he has done more for the movement, if the movement ever really existed. He did more than a lot of people to slightly slow the growth of the fedral gubmint a generation ago, let’s say.
Part of the war against Palin was to portray her as divisive.
When a governor proves to be perhaps the most popular governor in history, with numbers commonly in the 80s, the high 80s and even 93%, then they are a uniter, a person who is reaching all the people, of all persuasions and parties, there is just no way to describe someone who everyone approves of, as divisive.
Romney lost an election that couldn’t be lost in 2012 and what was his political history? A single governor’s term where he was run out of office with a 34% approval rating.
The primary in NH isn’t just among GOP voters—they’ll take all comers, which skews it decidedly more liberal.
And, I note that Reince Priebus did nothing to address that.
We need closed primaries.
She was divisive. Not among the base, which she united like McVain alone never could. But the reaction within the MSM and among libs generally showed her to be as maddening to them as a Reagan or a Goldwater. That she divided Establishment and conservative Pubs, as well, demonstrates where lies the Establishment on the spectrum.
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