Santorum Blasts Republican Moderates

Rick apparently doesn’t like moderates:

Rick Santorum continued to cast himself as a scrappy fighter against a mighty Republican “establishment” late Thursday – even lumping together former presidents and former presidential hopefuls into a losing clan of Republican moderates.

“You have an opportunity, here in Washington state, to join me …To say we want a conservative nominee for the Republican Party in the fall,” Santorum told hundreds of supporters in Pasco, Washington, ahead of the state’s caucuses on Saturday.

“We want a conservative nominee because that’s our best chance of winning. Look at the races in the last 30 years, we nominated a moderate: [John] McCain, [Bob] Dole, Gerald Ford. When George [H.W.] Bush ran for re-election back in 1992, after raising taxes and increasing spending. They all ran as moderates. We all lost,” Santorum said.

“Every time we’ve run as a conservative, we’ve won,” the candidate continued. “Why? Because Americans want a choice. If it’s a difference between somebody, Tweedledum and Tweedledee, you know what, this country is going to probably going to stick with the person they know. We need to have a sharp contrast. Someone who paints a very different vision for America.”

That last paragraph sounds like someone most conservatives revere:

I don ‘t know about you, but I am impatient with those Republicans who after the last election rushed into print saying, “We must broaden the base of our party”—when what they meant was to fuzz up and blur even more the differences between ourselves and our opponents.

It was a feeling that there was not a sufficient difference now between the parties that kept a majority of the voters away from the polls. When have we ever advocated a closed-door policy? Who has ever been barred from participating?

Our people look for a cause to believe in. Is it a third party we need, or is it a new and revitalized second party, raising a banner of no pale pastels, but bold colors which make it unmistakably clear where we stand on all of the issues troubling the people?

Reagan knew it in 1975. Being Democrat-lite is a path to failure. Too bad so many have either forgotten that principle, or never learned it in the first place.