Power is sweet. And a lot of the Republican Establishment can either be bought off, or they not really Conservative in the first place. Angelo Codevilla wrote a rather influential piece online ‘the Ruling Class’.

This is why everyone in power, Left and Right when nuts about Sarah Palin. She threatened the corrupt game.

Actually, we don’t need the vote of your parents. Your parents would be voting for the continuation of the car driving toward the cliff but better aka Romney. Given that your parents probably represent 2% of the population, and that satisfying them would infuriate about 40%….

I expect the libertarians to vote for Santorum or third party. Bill Quick, ‘the guy who named the blogosphere’ is one such who has come out for Santorum, and he is self-described ‘the cranky libertarian your mother warned you about’. To him, I’m a statist theocrat. But the chief advantage of getting libertarians on board is not their rahter small vote, its squelching their divisiveness.

The GOP is a barnyard chicken. Its main body is the Socon aka True Full Spectrum Conservative. Its largely inconsequential wings are the Hawks and the Libertarians.

One reason the wings are inconsequential is that most of what each wing stands for the body already stands for. Your typical socon is very libertarian, although more from pragmatic reasons than from doctrinal reasons like Libertarians. Same with the Hawk side.

Mark,
There are a number of strands as I say. Your strand is probably smaller than the He’s Got Nice Hair, the Low Info Types, the Pox Upon Both Housers. Which is not to say that it doesn’t have some larger influence, but that its not the dominant factor for very many.

Most socons don’t fear Paul’s fisconism because socons are Conservative, which includes fiscon.

What I see is that Rick is against contraception, but he understands that this is not a thing you can justly use the gov’t to suppress, so he uses moral exhortation. I see a man who has a firm grasp on the issues.

The notion that conservatives alienate the many different strands that make up moderates by being conservative is a creation of RINOs, Democrats, and the MSM….basically our Ruling Class.

I think this may be your blind spot. I am an intelligent educated centrist independent, son of parents who were also the same, both with graduate degrees, both highly intelligent, both attentive (more so than I) to the political world. They have voted for both parties; I have also, although not so much since the Democrats became the party of baby killing. We do exist, and we fear extremist positions of all sorts. Socialism is perceived as a danger, but so is pure capitalism. Extreme nationalism becomes fascist warmongering; extreme pacifism becomes docile pandering to powers that would take advantage. We want mostly moderate leaders, and vote for those who are not so only when the moderate leadership is failing.

It happens that unlike Adam I am comfortable with Santorum’s religious conservatism, more so than I am with Paul’s fiscal conservatism. Yet Adam is right: there are a huge number of fiscal conservatives who are threatened by the religious moral conservatives, as much as there are moral conservatives who fear the extreme fiscal conservatism of Paul.

These specific interest groups (there is no better way to describe them) within the Republican party do not understand that they do not define the Republican party. You cannot say that someone is “Republican In Name Only” without asserting that your particular faction is the defining faction of the party. We might suppose that twenty-five percent of the party is Libertarian, thirty percent Moral Conservative, fifteen percent Corporate Interests, and the remaining thirty percent near centrists who oppose the democrats as too liberal. No single group represents the majority of the party, but each is insular enough to believe it does. If the party splinters, the base collapses. If the moral conservatives won’t vote for Paul and the Libertarians won’t vote for Santorum, the party has no hope of fielding a viable candidate for the general election; thus a compromise candidate like Romney becomes the obvious choice–who is also the better choice, because Republicans are less than half the voting public and Democrats are less than half the voting public, and so both sides desperately need the votes of people like my parents, who will vote for the most moderate candidate in the field.

It was complained years ago, around the time of the Carter/Ford race but at other times as well, that there was no difference between the candidates put forward by the two parties. That’s because if there is not some overriding reason for centrists to oppose one candidate they will vote for the most moderate candidate in the field.

As for Nixon, I might have been in a bad place to have a clear perspective, being a high school student in New Jersey whose peers all feared being sent to Viet Nam, but I never met anyone at that time who liked Nixon, and I met a lot of people who were afraid of McGovern’s extremism. I dare say Nixon didn’t win so much as McGovern lost. (It’s more complicated than that–Eagleton became an insurmountable problem as running mate, because once he had been named and then it was uncovered that he had received psychological counseling at some point, keeping him on the ticket would cost votes and removing him from the ticket would cost votes, and worst of all was announcing that he would be kept on the ticket and then removing him. But McGovern had a very strong following of extremist Doves, and alienated the centrist independents entirely.)

I like Santorum and would vote for him. I would be much less enthused about Paul, but at this point am concerned enough about Obama that I would vote against him no matter who was opposed. That’s going to bring in a lot of centrist independents to the Republican side, provided they are not more afraid of whatever extremist candidate the Republicans field against him. That’s the danger with Santorum, as with Paul. Maybe there is enough anti-Obama sentiment to overcome it and put an extreme conservative in office, but with the economy teetering on the edge of recovery Obama’s ratings are up and that spells trouble for conservatives.

–M. J. Young

Do you think Santorum is electable in the general?

He’s probably what would be called an extreme; there are of course several “extremes” in the Republican party–Paul is also an extreme, but his is a Libertarian wing extremism and Santorum is more a Religious Right extremism, fiscally moderately conservative.

Romney’s strength is that he’s much more a moderate conservative. He’s definitely on the conservative side of center on both moral and fiscal issues, but he’s not going to alienate centrist independents the way Santorum (or Paul) might.

Extreme candidates (e.g., Reagan, who was a perennial joke candidate prior to 1980; Obama when Cain couldn’t distance himself from the economic problems plaguing the Bush Administration) get elected when there is high dissatisfaction with the status quo blamed on the incumbent party, and they can’t distance themselves from the problems. At the moment, things are perceived to be improving fiscally–I don’t hear a lot of liberals dissatisfied with their own party, and that means there won’t be much disaffection from the Democratic block no matter who runs. That means whoever runs for the Republicans has to capture the center, or as much of it as possible. That would not be too difficult for Romney, as centrists already see Obama as extreme; but if you put Santorum forward, it will be between the extreme you know and the extreme you don’t know, and if the extreme you know happens to be doing well with the economy by then, he’s going to be re-elected.

It’s a bit like McGovern in ’72. Probably almost anyone the Democrats had put forward would have beaten Nixon; a lot of people were unhappy with Viet Nam and did not believe the war was ending. The Doves (one of the Democrats’ extremist groups) put forward McGovern, and he was slaughtered, because Nixon wasn’t doing badly enough for the centrists to risk an extreme candidate.

Santorum might be the mirror of McGovern: a golden boy with the party extremists who can’t capture the center if Obama doesn’t alienate them. Romney can probably carry the right extremists because he’s conservative “enough” and the Republicans will vote for anyone over Obama. He can probably also capture a lot of the centrists who don’t trust Obama but don’t want to leap to the opposite extreme.

Anyway, I wrote a longer comment than your piece, and don’t expect you to be able to get to it any time soon, but it’s there whenever you’re available.

–M. J. Young