Allen since your Catholic Brotha’s tend to side with the evangelicals come election time do you think that wing is the problem?
That is if we agree that we’ve lost that Dick Armey kind of edginess, is it because of the evangelicals/catholics that moved to the GOP? I generally am around people of this persuasion more often than any other group, and I hear very little admiration of the Bush years.
Let me ask in a more simple fashion. We both agree the GOP lost it’s way. More Compassionate Conservatism, less Heritage Foundation, less Thomas Sowell, I get that. However I don’t know that the evangelicals are the cause of this shift leftward. You might suggest that the evangelicals might scare off folks who are barely republican. Let’s say you spent a good deal of time with Heritage Foundation or Hoover Institution writings. (heck I don’t read this stuff anymore either, too into other things like coaching). Would some anti-abortion member of your party cause you to throw out your economic beliefs? Folks like Gandalf and the venom he seems to have towards the GOP in just 4 years means I doubt he was ever brought into the party by a Dick Armey type guy.
So my opinion is that the folks who’ve been chased away likely weren’t big small government types in the first place. More likely they were centrists who made a temporary move right and now shift back left and blame religious people but they never were believers in shrinking government. I submit that the GOP base is pretty turned off by the shift right. Even those who plugged their nose and endorsed McCain in the last few days didn’t seem very sincere.
