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.
CW,
I’m grateful for your blog and I have great respect for you, but Santorum is not our guy. While none of our candidates have “it,” Santorum isn’t even in the penumbra of “it.” I’m in the anybody-but-Obama category, so I’ll vote for whomever is the GOP nominee; but if Santorum is our candidate, we don’t have a snowballs chance in hell of defeating Obama. And yes, I know that’s what they said about Reagan. But Santorum is no Reagan. In this case, I agree with and Coulter.
http://www.anncoulter.com/columns/2012-02-29.html
So you’d rather go with the Democrat-lite who…
* Promised NARAL he’d be “moderate” on abortion
* Proclaimed he didn’t want to go back to the era of Reagan
* Signed into law the precursor to ObamaCare
If you consider yourself a conservative, listen to the words of Reagan. And remember, in the early days of the 1980 campaign, Reagan was considered unelectable and too extreme too.
Santorum’s not my first choice, or even my second, but he’s the best of the mediocre group we have left.
“he’s the best of the mediocre group we have left”
He’s a big government social conservative who thinks moral issues are more important than shrinking the federal government. He’s the second worst candidate of the the three.
“Being Democrat-lite is a path to failure.”
Than say of Romney what should be said.
The man is only fit for the Democratic Party primary.
Of course that presumes two things that are far from proven:
1. That every issues has only two sides, and that each party must represent a diametrically opposed side on each issue.
2. That the side he chooses for a particular issue actually represents the conservative viewpoint.
Santorum is a pro-union rust-belt nobody whose only success came when he worked for Gingrich.
I think you have your facts a little mixed up.
Santorum left the House the same year Gingrich became Speaker, 1995. From 1995-2007, Santorum was in the Senate, not the House; Gingrich was Speaker from 1995-1999. Before 1995, Gingrich was House Minority Whip, which is at best the 2nd highest rank in the minority party, under the Minority Leader.
In any case, the members do not “work for” the leadership of the House, they are supposed to “work for” the voters, i.e. the people that elected them.
I’d bet that you’d say that the Democratic members that voted for ObamaCare should have paid attention to the voters that sent them that didn’t want that monstrosity of a bill, and probably complain that they followed the instructions of the Democrat leadership rather than the people of their districts. But suddenly, when it’s politically convenient for your chosen candidate, you say that a member of the House “works for” the leadership.
I smell hypocrisy.
Well, you’re certainly able to smell yourself at that distance…
Hey, one cheap shot deserves another.
Don’t know why this did show up the first time.
“One cheap shot deserves another.”