There are indeed many Freepers, and conservatives in general, who will not deviate from that litmus test and I understand their reasoning. But the pro-abortion candidates who are running for President on the Republican side have much more liberal baggage than just that. Do you see anyone in the field that will at least try to make significant cuts in the size of government?
No, I don't, and I don't expect to in the foreseeable future. Given that certainly less than half the electorate actually views this as a desirable goal (probably a LOT less than half), it's simply impossible for a candidate to be viable if s/he openly expresses an intention to do this, or has a history of actions suggesting s/he will do this. The very best we can hope for is a candidate who, deep down, understands that this should be the goal, and understands that while no direct action towards that end is politically possible at this time, there are subtle choices that can be made to gradually shift the electorate in that direction in order to help make real government-shrinking a viable political platform at some point in the future.
The insidious aspect of socialism is how it ropes in people to support it, even when they philosophically disagree with it. It starts with emotionally appealing pitches to help the most unfortunate in our society, and the emotionally appealing lie that all those people languishing at the bottom can actually be transformed into responsible productive members of society. This gets hard-working, responsible people to agree to a certain amount of taxation for redistribution. The pitch is then incrementally shifted to define more and more people as unfairly disadvantaged. The people near the top, who have the most money and influence, and therefore control the selection of candidates, are for the most part easily persuaded that a family making $50,000 a year "needs help" to send their children to college, and feel arrogant and heartless if they sense their thoughts moving towards "Do their kids really NEED to go to college? For four years, full-time, right out of high school? . . . Like my kids?" And then of course there are the pitches about the elderly, and their "need" for huge amounts of expensive medical care and prescription drugs, and how morally bankrupt we would be if we let a single elderly person go without medical care that would extend their lives for a few more months (at a cost of a few hundred thousand dollars). The Great Depression brought us Social Security, which is by far the most devastating piece of this whole monster, but which was well-intentioned, and brought into being by an electorate which had grown up in a society where self-sufficiency was the norm, and where very few people were willing to accept any sort of hand-out unless they had really exhausted their own avenues for self-help and were truly desperate. My late grandmother always refused to take the Social Security checks for which she was eligible, on the grounds that it was supposed to be only for the very needy. Never mind that she had to keep her thermostat set at an unhealthy low level through the Iowa winters, in order to make ends meet without that check. These were the people who voted in the Social Security program during the Great Depression and its aftermath.
Before you know it, more than half the country is enjoying one or more types of handouts from the government. It's VERY hard to find anyone who thinks that public schools shouldn't exist in something very similar to their current form. The idea that children whose parents can't pay for their schooling and who can't entice some private charity to pay for it based on high ability and character, ought to get a basic 3Rs education through about 8th grade, in spartan facilities, with no sports/music/drama facilities and programs, and kicked out of even that if they aren't actually studying and learning, is simply unthinkable to about 95% of our society. The entire elderly and near-elderly segment of our population has paid into Medicare and Social Security all their lives IF they actually worked (but if they didn't, you can be sure they have also not been donors or volunteers for political campaigns), and are not in a position to even consider advocating the near-term shutdown of those programs, much less to consider helping pay for their grandchildren's educations beyond the huge sums in property taxes that they're already paying to help educate everybody else's children AND grandchildren. A large majority of college students are receiving some form of government-sourced financial aid. Just who do you imagine is really going to campaign and vote for a prompt and dramatic rollback of socialist programs?
So how do we start the rollback? In much the same way as the monster got its foothold -- quietly, craftily, with a long-term plan. You can't tell me that approach didn't work :-) Here's a starter: deregulate medical care. In the guise of promoting "personal freedom", start eliminating the prescription-required status for drugs, one by one, eventually eliminating the prescription requirement for all but those few which are truly dangerous to people OTHER than those who voluntarily take them (think vancomycin, Rohypnol). Hmmm, lots more people won't be going to the government-reimbursed doctor every time they come down with some routine illness they or their family members have had before. Make basic medical self-care a part of the public school curriculum (in the guise of promoting "public health" for the disadvantaged -- and of course, it will have that effect, but it's far too early to let on that that the plan is for the "public health" to become the responsibility of the individual members of the "public"). Make sure kids are learning how to diagnose and treat their own routine illnesses by going to the Internet for information. Make sure the cause-and-effect relationships between lifestyle and attention to routine medical care, and health outcomes are driven home loud and clear -- it's a quick hop from grasping that concept, to realizing that a great deal of people's health problems are the direct result of their own stupid or lazy choices.
Medical care is by far the biggest-ticket piece of the socialist monster, and the fastest-growing one, and the one that is most easily sustained by emotional appeals (children are dying! mothers with breast cancer are dying! helpless old people are dying! all because you greedy people won't give the government enough money to pay their bills!). It's also ripe for attack with a pitch of "You can do it! You should be free to make your own choices!" Get a generation raised in the idea that medical care is as much an area for personal free choice as shopping for clothes and music, and the electorate's receptivity to the idea of reducing, rather than increasing government involvement will shift tremendously. Doing this would involve shifting, not cutting, federal government funding of public schools -- in the short run, it wouldn't shrink government, but in the long run it would. In the short run, shifting rather than cutting is the best we can hope for, across virtually all parts of the monster. In short:
WE MUST CO-OPT THE MONSTER. We don't have the strength to kill it, and can't afford to kill it (it would just rise back up again even stronger), before we have forced it to do our bidding. Quit looking for candidates making preposterous claims that they will kill the monster -- they don't even have the strength to cut off its pinky finger, but they'll make it plenty angry by trying. Vote for candidates who hint at carefully-veiled plans to co-opt the monster.