You are forgetting Perot drew 17% of votes, and a large portion of that was not exactly left-wing frommy recollection.
I forgot nothing, I didn't attribute Clinton's victory entirely to his efforts to cast himself as a moderate, I said, "it worked well enough to help Clinton win a couple of terms in the White House."
I didn't mention that Perot drew 19% of the votes, largely from the right, nor did I mention that those votes from the right came from voters who were disenchanted with the "centrist" appeasement of George HW Bush, because these facts were beside the point of politicians moving to reclaim lost votes.
Did you not read Poohbah's post earlier about a group that pushed support to a third party candidate and took down a Republican because the Republican was "impure"?
Yeah, I saw that.
However, given the faultiness of his recollection of the facts of Impeachment and the '98 election here, as shown there, I really don't know what to make of his anecdotal account of an anonymous election scenario.
Where were the conservative groups running ads to counter the AFL-CIO's Mediscare ads? Where were the press conferences and street demonstrations? Where were they?
Where were the GOP pols? Failing to make the case in Sunday show after Sunday show that it was Clinton who shut down the government.
Where was the RNC? Their issue advertising helped defeat HillaryCare in '94, but they went silent during Clinton's government shutdown in '95.
Appeasement? That's the problem I have with this. There are some issues (free trade, immigration, and others) that there seem to be legitimate disagreements on between conservatives, partially motivated on where people happen to be residing, partially based on the experiences they or people they know have had, and partially based on PRINCIPLE.
Upon what conservative principle would an extension of Clinton and the Democrats' Section 245(i) Amnesty program for Illegal Aliens be based? Or President Bush's AlGore lite prescription drug entitlement?
Unfortunately, some here prefer to attack those who disagree with them on certain issues. That does nothing towards crafting a conservative message that will win over the center. In fact, it DIVIDES the party.
Forcing the party to adopt divisive policies is divisive.
If tomorrow, President Bush wanted national handgun confiscation or a federally funded abortion entitlement, and the GOP was predictably divided over it, with whom would the responsibility for that division lay?
Let me guess, the "unappeasables?"
If the mule can do the job (get a candidate elected, thereby giving us a CHANCE at enacting the agenda), then the bargain isn't a bad one.
You missed the metaphor: mules are sterile, mares are not.
OK, Saber. I'll give you the 1998 election--but I will tell you WHY they went centrist, and it was because it was clear that conservatives were very long on talk and very short on turnout no matter what happened. Can't really blame the party for hunting for votes elsewhere after 1995--they got their a$$es handed to them by Clinton, and grass-roots conservatives were nowhere to be seen during that fiasco. I spent most of the summer of 1995 trying to organize a letter-writing campaign for the upcoming fight--and got told "I'll just send an email," no matter how often I told people that emails could and would be erased, but ignoring out lots of dead trees was a lot more difficult. A RINO was far more likely to send a letter--but most "conservative" couldn't be bothered.
Thanks, you lame-a$$ no-shows! Thank y'all for 4 more years of Clinton!
However, after that fall-on-their-sword effort in late 1998, they got ZERO support during the impeachment fight from conservatives (just like they never got any during the budget showdown in 1995--once again, conservatives just could not be bothered to write large numbers of actual LETTERS to Congress instead of sending worthless emails), and the conservative vote did not show up in large enough numbers in 2000 to justify the investment thus made.
Let's face it--conservatives don't want candidates, they want the Second Coming. Unfortunately for them, tha one is in God's hands, not ours.
"Forcing the party to adopt divisive policies is divisive.
If tomorrow, President Bush wanted national handgun confiscation or a federally funded abortion entitlement, and the GOP was predictably divided over it, with whom would the responsibility for that division lay?
Let me guess, the "unappeasables?" "
The fault with the analagies you draw in that post is that NEITHER of those policies are REMOTELY considered by the GOP. NIETHER of them. Both of those are, in fact, rejected in GENERAL by Republicans. They are, in essense, straw man arguments trying to paint me as an "appeaser."
In short, you are CREATING a false premise. The fact is, good conservatives disagree on immigration in general, and even to an extent on how to handle Illegals. That last one has been argued to death. You will NOT convince me to adopt the Buchanan-Tancredo-Malkin line on immigration, and I won't talk you out of it. The question is, will YOU hold a Republican hostage over a disagreement on that issue, as some of the "unappeasables" are doing to a Republican in Louisiana (URL below this paragraph)?
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/753470/posts
Are you willing to take THESE dividers on? They are holding the GOP hostage, too.
"You missed the metaphor: mules are sterile, mares are not."
It all depends on what you NEED the mule/mare for. If you just need to haul things, then me trading one mare for a couple of mules benefits me a lot more, particularly since the mules can't get preganant and cause me to LOSE the ability to haul things during the pregnancy.
It depends on what the priorities are. If you're breeding horses or donkeys, mares are more valuable than mules. For hauling things, a mule is better.