A fiscally conservative moderate… you do realize the last president to balance the budget was a Democrat? That isn’t the problem
The problem is that Conservatives lionize guys that aren’t small government, aren’t fiscally conservative, then try to turn around and blame them for spending when things go wrong. (when things go right they just pretend the spending/expansion never happened, see: Reagan)
In my opinion the problem is that conservatives aren’t the people in the republican party that set policy. It’s the moderates, the technocrats, the neocons etc. They have all these newfangled policy ideas to build majorities, and the conservatives already exhausted their policy salvos by the 90′s. Once conservatives again become a group that has something to offer in terms of policy, then people will stop deferring to the technocrats, the RINO’s, the party elites.
Now, I’m not saying that no conservatives have ideas, just that those ideas will have to be embraced by conservatives as a whole, not just fringe sections like the ron paul guys. Once there is a dominant force for that, then you will have the candidates with policy you want, rather then just voting for the candidate that only has the rhetoric you want.
