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There is one thing in your reply to agree with but that is of such intrinsic significance that redeems the rest.:)

LOL! Oh, how very...kind ;)

You put your finger on turn out although you do not use the term.

Yes, though "turn-out" implies ownership, which is not the case. That is the essential difference between Conservatives and the rest of the Republican base.

I think that is the remaining hope for the conservative cause as it faces a daunting wall of obstacles in the next election.

But, nathanbedford, that has always been our only hope. You make it sound so frightening and dire. There is no daunting wall of obstacles. There is only one. Moderate Bakerite control of the Republican Party. These wolves in sheep's clothing are the enemy within the gate. As long as they continue their co-opting of the Conservative message, and their intentional subduction of Conservatives within the party, there will be no Conservative revolution in the Republican party.

That in itself is dire, and nearly insurmountable - But only because of people continuing to believe in the sheep's clothing that the wolves have donned. It is Republican pragmatism which is our greatest threat, as has always been the case.

As for Socialism/Liberalism coming from the Democrats, I fear that not a bit, as these are Conservatives' natural prey. Whatever is instituted can just as easily be removed. It is the lack of will, or dare I say, complicity, within the supposed opposition which allow these unconstitutional things to stand.

We must keep in mind that the numbers I have quoted were of "voters" but even in a national election for President, the intensity factor never much exceeds 55% (56.8% in' 08) and in the mid-to high 30% range for midterms (37.1% in' 06) That leaves a lot of room for play, especially in 2010.

While I too, am fond of statistical analysis, I find that in most things, statistical numbers can be bent to deliver just about any conclusion. Especially when one is dealing with single digit percentiles. It is the trends that interest me - those things that can be taken from the broad terms.

The broad trends will show that when Democrats can play to the right of Republicans, they win. Furthermore, the further toward the right the Republicans play, the greater their win. The obvious conclusion would be to play hard to the Conservative base, and follow through once in office, nearly guaranteeing a dynasty. Since that is not what Republican leaders do, their motives obviously lie elsewhere.

And this is where the argument that this is a conservative nation comes in. When an issue arises such as the governance provided by Barack Obama in busting the budget with porkulus, the budget itself, Cap and Trade, and healthcare, voter intensity increases.

While this is certainly a factor which can leverage turn out, it will end end infamously under the current moderate Republican leadership- I guarantee it. What one will be left with is mere Liberal Republicanism, not Conservatism. And the follow-through on promises made is what will secure the nation. That follow-through has been absent ever since Reagan.

I, and many of my kind, will rise against this socialism as surely as the socialism the Democrats offer, for neither one is palatable. So I care less for what may spark off turn out. It is not important what the other side is doing. What is important is Conservatism's solutions, and long term commitment to Conservative principle within the party mechanism.

I believe that cannot be accomplished using the Republicans as a vehicle. If it can, it will be signaled by a wholesale stepping-down of the present leadership, and an ascendancy of Conservatives. If that does not happen, I don't think the Republicans will get the trust of Conservatives, regardless of the conditions or promises.

Turning our attention now to the electoral condition of the country and the demographic challenge which confronts the Republican party, let me first identify the areas where we agree. We agree generally that it is a restoration of conservative virtue and nothing less which will see us through. To establish my bona fides on this subject I submit the following reply made before Obama took office:

Here is a portion of a post which I published before the election in response to a politico article calling for Republicans and conservatives to move left to fill the big tent:

As we conservatives drag the remnants of our movement into the wilderness with no idea how we will emerge or whether we will ever emerge as an electoral force in America which is recognizable by my generation, we must inevitably engage ourselves in the most soul- searing inquiry of what went wrong. This will be an agony but equally it will be effective only to the degree that it hurts. It will not succeed without bloodshed. There must be finger-pointing and bloodletting. We must carve to the bone. The process must be Darwinian. Those whose ideas are false must be bayoneted on the trail.

The object is to find our soul - nothing less. In a come to Jesus sense we must get absolutely clear what it means to be a conservative. Only at this point do we look to the tent flaps and open them. Those who cannot subscribe to the hard-won consensus, to a confession of faith as to what is a conservative, should walk out through that flap. Those who are attracted from the outside to the core message of conservatism should be encouraged to walk through the flap and enlarge the tent. What the left wants us to do is to expand the census in the tent prematurely and thus turn a movement into a menagerie. The Soul-searching must be conducted by conservatives without the earnest ministrations from liberals like those of Politico. This article, of course, has nothing whatever to do with explaining why Republicans lost 2008 election across the board, it has everything to do with first efforts by the left to sabotage the rebuilding process on the right which must be done exclusively by the right.

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. And that philosophy must first have a vertical spiritual component which finds expression and out working in a horizontal governing philosophy.

Because of his race, Obama was asked only to demonstrate that he could walk and talk like a president. Obama has won the middle, not because he pandered to them, which he did, but because he had the wind at his back.

As John McCain reverts from titular head of the Republican Party to United States Senator, it falls to the rest of us to contrive a governing philosophy which he, unfortunately, did not own and therefore could not bequeath to us. We had such a legacy from Ronald Reagan but we squandered it. We must construct our own. We must do it in the wilderness. We must do it unaided by intermeddling liberals. Their's is the serpent's way, the easy way, a pander to the superficially popular, the accommodation to the middle. The bed of birth has always been a bed of pain. The pain must be embraced if we are to receive a new life.

My objection to this approach is that it is a know- nothing approach. When one talks about poll numbers one weighs the predictive ability of a quasi-science. Even so, no sensible politician would go to war without being armed with the latest polls. That is because the predictive qualities have been demonstrated election after election. Not infallible, they are nevertheless valuable. To abandon them is to abandon an objective tie to reality. The know- nothing approach permits us to float freely in space pronouncing on every matter of political science as it suits our fancy.

How much more true is all of this when one considers that most of the numbers that I have cited have to do not with predictive polls but with actual voting results or exit polling data.

So we must be wary of those who lie with statistics. But we also must be wary of those who deny the reality of the science. We see this phenomenon played out every cycle here on Free Republic. When the polls favor us, we accept them on face value and reject them when they make us unhappy. This leaves us at sea without a fixed pole, without a starting point, with no idea where the hell we are, or where we are going, or how to get there.

But it leaves us firmly ensconced in our own opinions.

You and I agree that conservatism is the medicine to restore the Republican Party's fortunes. I just posted, or rather reposted, a lengthy reply to that effect. But that reply is utterly unsupported by statistical data. It is merely my opinion. If I were a politician I would certainly not embark on a campaign, staking the future of the Republican Party and the conservative movement, on my uninstructed, unilluminated opinions. They might or might not make logical sense, but they have no intrinsic scientific value. If I were the chairman of the Republican National Committee, I would be doing what Newt Gingrich has been doing And What the Democrat National Committee has been undoubtedly doing: polling, polling, polling!

This is how the professionals behave and there is a reason for it. For all my criticisms of Karl Rove for his declensions from conservative orthodoxy, I do not fault him for lack of mechanical ability. Neither you or I have established any credentials as mechanics. I have tried to react to what I see as objective numbers which at least are congruent with the colors on the electoral map. That does not mean my explanation is the reason the colors are there but at least we are operating with deductive reasoning. What we abandon all ties to what the mechanics can tell us, we abandon political science for philosophy and we have converted before the election the electoral map into a child's coloring book.

Let's turn to the interaction between conservatism and the Republican Party. Again you state a principal with which I agree:

What is important is Conservatism's solutions, and long term commitment to Conservative principle within the party mechanism.

While I believe that the salvation for the Republican Party is to restore conservatism, I have the humility to admit that this is my opinion. My opinion on whether this is the proper, as opposed to the electorally successful route to go, however, is as valid as the next man's.

Likewise my opinion as to whether our side can prevail without the apparatus of the Republican Party is valid for what it purports to be: an opinion. That opinion is that a rump conservative electoral effort will doom us to defeat. My opinion is that the apparatus of the party itself is not just valuable but indispensable to running and winning national elections which cost money approaching $1 billion. Only the party can supply the infrastructure, the boots on the ground, the expertise for the air war, the proper exploitation of the Internet, the national visibility, the fund raising ability.

Our founding fathers were not naïve, but they entertained a skeptical view of the nature of man as a political creature. So they set up a system which anticipated unceasing tension. Although they deplored political parties, they made them virtually inevitable if society was to govern in a system in which the founders had placed so many obstacles to effective government. Political parties are designed to undo what the founders did, to bridge the gaps created by the founders as checks and balances. So, for longer than two centuries our society has been at eternal war with itself, always risking totalitarian government (such as today under Obama) by strong political parties on the one hand or risking ineffectual government such as we saw under The Articles Confederation or under the Southern Confederacy on the other hand.

Similarly, the parties themselves are under tension which is unceasing and in the long run very healthy for a political body. Every party is ever at war with itself. So it is with the Democrats and so it is with the Republicans. If we Conservatives win the battle this season, as surely as the tides return, we will be confronted with another Rino challenge in the next season. That is good because without the tension there is nothing to prevent a political party-or, worse, a governing party-to veer ever farther to the left or right and wreck the country as it commits suicide. The best example of this occurring in history is the inability of the Soviet Union Communist Party to correct itself. Why were there 70 years of bad weather affecting Soviet harvests? Because the Communist Party simply couldn't honestly look at its own policies.

And so it is that when we indulge our predilections, reject what objective reality we can put together, Parade know- nothing ism as a virtue, we risk veering off. Fortunately for our party and our government system there is a check, it is called elections, and those political parties which do not gauge reality accurately will soon be corrected. The job of the Karl Roves of the world is to obviate the need for the correction to occur.

Viva the tension.