Spoken like a paid political advisor.
I realize you're not making the claim that I'm being paid, just that I speak “like a paid political advisor.”
Just to avoid any misunderstandings, not only am I not paid by anybody to write what I'm writing, I'm losing money and harming my business by spending ***WAY*** too much time this week and last week reading about the Iowa caucuses, and for national news of the campaign, monitoring Free Republic (which, BTW, is the best news aggregator anywhere from a conservative perspective).
Am I a political junkie? Yeah, I guess so. In my view, paying attention to politics as an informed citizen is important. And yes, I've given a lot of informal advice in local elections over the years, but I've never been a paid political adviser for anybody, and this year I don't know what I'd advise anybody to do in the election because I don't know how I'll vote myself.
I realize that lots of people say on the internet that they're undecided, but in my case I truly don't know who I would be voting for if I still lived in Iowa, where I once worked as a reporter and where I've had personal and church connections for more than two decades.
By the time we get around to voting in Missouri, the race will be narrower and my choice will likely be clearer. But right now I don't know who I support.
What I badly want is a candidate who has the following characteristics:
1. A strong social issues conservative, especially on abortion and the “culture war,” which in the current race means Perry, Bachmann, and Santorum. Ideally I'd prefer an evangelical, but I can live with a conservative Roman Catholic who is a supporter of capital punishment and free enterprise and national defense, ignoring the left-wing semi-socialist stuff that too often comes out of the Roman Catholic hierarchy. I might be able to vote for a secular neo-conservative who I was satisfied held to traditional moral values and would appoint strict constructionist judges to the Supreme Court. (That, by the way, is where I think Newt Gingrich falls, as well as some of our other conservative political leaders who may claim a church affiliation but don't seem to be deeply committed to their faith.)
2. A strong stance on national defense, which is the primary purpose of government. Having a prior record of being pro-police on the local and state level helps, but I don't believe the federal government has a constitutional role in local law enforcement. I think basically everybody except Ron Paul is okay on this issue, though some are better than others.
3. Prior experience in government is important to me, preferably executive experience. In the current race, only Perry qualifies as someone with successful long-term executive experience, though Gingrich and Santorum both have many years of successful legislative experience. I'd like to vote for a governor or maybe the mayor or county executive of a large city or large county since some cities and counties are bigger than some of our states. If you can't show me that you've been successful in the past, it's pretty hard for me to know if you'll be successful in the future.
4. A commitment to free enterprise should be assumed in the Republican Party, but that can't always be taken for granted. Free enterprise and capitalism isn't something new or different; it's the way the world always worked until socialist schemes of theft of private property started to be advocated. Having a candidate with solid experience in private business is much less important to me than solid experience in government — put bluntly, private companies can be run by their owners in ways that government cannot and should not be run because in America the people are the bosses of the politicians — but having a strong track record of support for private business is important to me if a candidate doesn't have private business experience himself.
5. Last but definitely not least important, we need a candidate who can defeat President Obama this fall. He is the target, not fellow Republicans. That doesn't mean I support a moderate nominee; on the contrary, I believe we need a nominee who can energize the conservative base to contribute money and time, who will turn out lots of Republicans to vote rather than stay home, and who can convince conservative independents and conservative Democrats to vote Republican on the ground that Obama is a dangerous socialist.
Unfortunately, it looks like the two candidates who are ideologically the best, Bachmann and Santorum, may turn out to be the least electable other than Ron Paul, who is a nut case and has no chance of winning the nomination, let alone the general election.
Is that an argument for supporting Perry? Maybe, but he's seriously flubbed up in the debates in ways you don't expect a successful governor of a large state to do. As for Gingrich, even if he's electable by standard calculus, we as Republicans have worked for decades to make ourselves into the party of moral values and nominating Gingrich with his history of philandering will do tremendous damage to something we've worked more than thirty years to establish.
I could add quite a few more “nice to haves,” but commitment to moral values, commitment to protecting people's lives and property, and a track record of experience showing that the commitments are real and not just good-sounding words are all very important to me.
None of the Republican candidates who are actually running perform well on the five-point standard I've just listed, though some are better than others and some (Romney and Paul) are definite no-gos because I can't trust them to protect the life of unborn babies or to protect our country against foreign enemies. I can think of former governors who I might wish were in the race, but they aren't. We're stuck with a set of choices that I, for one, am really unhappy are our only choices.