[MadIvan]

Please accept my apologies. I thought this was a forum where conservative solutions were championed, not ridiculed.

You're not presenting a solution. You're just saying unless you get your definition of a "true conservative", you're going to sit on your hands. That's not a solution, that's a recipe for surrender. It's not being conservative, it's being a whingeing brat.

..but even were I to accept your "compromise is a virtue" brand of realpolitick, you're going to have to remember something, Rudy will never sell the "I'm a born again Christian routine" to Pat and Jim and D. James.

Who said he would?

Even a crass pragmatist could come up with someone better than Rudy.

Name 2 candidates who are better positioned, then.

Ivan

[farmer18th]

It's easy to name candidates better positioned than Rudy, even if we reserve judgement, finally, to evaluate their positions under pressure:

Tancredo, Brownback, Pence

The point is this: asking real conservatives to get excited about an unscrupulous, squishy liberal like Rudy, under the banner "less liberal than Hillary" is totally unecessary. There are two years to begin re-stating the message that got Reagan elected and the 94 congress in power. It's time to weed out the Republicans who never met a government program they didn't like.

The American center is properly seeing the current school of Republicans as the guys who raid the federal purse for their own pet projects. If that's all they can do, they go back to their old welfare Democrats.

The guy that leads the charge can't be a child of government, as Rudy undeniably is.