Rino Safari: What Would Reagan Do?

"Conservatism is not a narrow ideology, nor is it the exclusive property of conservative activists."
-- Ronald Reagan, 1977

Last night was a victory for conservatism.  Reagan shows us how to build on it. 

Scozzafava had no business being in the Republican party. She was a RINO and showed her disloyalty to the organization that funded her by endorsing the Democrat. She was beyond the pale and I'm glad the conservative activists hounded her out of the party.

I also generally disdain those Republicans who twist themselves into ideological pretzels trying to justify "moderation."

But everybody the other side of Reagan is not a RINO. With Scozzafava, it wasn't gay marriage and pro-abortion that sunk her. If she had stood strongly against card check, taxes, big government and the bailouts she probably would have survived to go on to be the next Congresswoman from NY-23.

Politics is about addition, not subtraction

Multifarious GOP factions calling names and declaring jihad on one another is the sure road to failure. Politics is about gaining power so you can influence and control the course of government. You do that by winning elections, not picking fights with teammates who don't think exactly like you do.

Ronald Reagan knew it back in 1977 when they were saying the Republican party was dead.  Savvy conservatives considering a third party should heed his words:

The biggest single grouping of conservatives is to be found in that party. It makes more sense to build on that grouping than to break it up and start over," he said to those who suggested that option.

A RINO stampede sounds like fun, but Reagan would not approve. Consider these comments from the same 1977 address to conservative activists.

"Let me say this about our friends who are now Republicans but do not identify themselves as conservatives. I want the record to show that I do not view the new revitalized Republican party as one based on a principle of exclusion."

What is a Republican?  That remains to be sorted out over the next year.  As we do, we should consider the words of proto-Republican Abraham Lincoln:

With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation's wounds...

Polls, and now elections, show that voters are rejecting Obama's politics of the past.  Conservatism is on the ascendancy.  Be of good cheer!