Conservatism in the Republican Party is only mostly dead. There’s a big difference between mostly dead and all dead. Mostly dead is slightly alive.

brilliant!

Any alternative conservative candidate that pulls less than 10% is going to send the GOP a very clear message:

“We don’t need those crackpots anyway.”

Why do people think that proving you can get 2% of diehards to vote for you sends a message to the main stream of the party?

Well, like I said on another thread, until I graduated high school I was a Buchanan supporter.

I quite agree that unless you can threaten 20% or so, it’s not worth it in the end.

I continue to be amazingly disappointed at how much everyone talked down the serious alternative to McCain, Fred Thompson, from early in the primary race. With Thompson running to the right (and no “who is this Jesus guy anyway” issue) of Romney and Giuliani, and Huckabee off doing late-night TBN huckstering, McCain wouldn’t even have had a slice of this. McCain owes Huckabee and a lot of people who think only the power-hungry should be heard in campaigns his political life. This doesn’t make me happy at all.

Pgepps, I’m still dumbfounded as to how McCain got to where he is today. Conservatives don’t like him, democrats don’t like him, only independents seem to like him and they don’t constitute much of the voting population. So I ask again, who the heck are all these people voting for him?

the 40% in the middle of any standard ideological voting distribution, who are neither well-informed nor committed enough to be drawn strongly one way or the other (joining the 20% at either end). That’s my guess.

Principled “independents” are rare birds, mostly fictitious. Not-very-Republicans and not-very-Democrats make up the “centrist” constituency. They are the ideological base of “slouching towards Bethlehem” or Gomorrah, the self-hewn paving stones on The Road to Serfdom.

and, y’know, can I say, I think in many ways McCain is the price we Christians involved in politics will have to pay for trying to simultaneously back the propositions “the church, as church, adopting a prophetic role with regard to the United States of America, should be a political constituency” and “the church, as church, adopting a prophetic role with regard to the USA, should back a Mormon out of political expediency.” Even the very political Bob Jones University backed off when two of its most public voices personally endorsed the Mormon.

You can’t have it both ways. If the church, as church, is a political constituency, then the church, as church, can only back its own. Enter the problem whether Mike Huckabee is worth a mass.

Let us hope McCain is the worst price we’ll pay.

Huh. And I was going to blame it on the misinformed masses turning out on primary day pulling the proverbial lever for the first name they recognized. Since McCain has been around awhile (a long while), he got the stupid vote.

Pentamom: What about the huge percentages Perot pulled in 92? That message seemed to wear off quick.

“neither well-informed nor committed enough” = “the stupid vote”

maybe.

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