Travel with God-o-Meter way back to September 2007, when religious conservative activists, led by Focus on the Family’s James Dobson, threatened to bolt the GOP and back a third-party candidate in November in the event that Rudy Giuliani got the party’s nomination. Now that a religious conservative is leading the Republican pack, distraught economic conservatives are feeling the same way. From Ryan Hawkins at Townhall:
What is most ironic about the continued Huckasurge from evangelicals is that evangelical leaders are the ones who threatened to abandon the GOP in the general election if a pro-choice nominee such as Giuliani were to end up being the nominee. (Remember September, 2007 with the meeting in Salt Lake City where these evangelical leaders mulled over the idea of running an independent candidate if Rudy became the nominee?) Now these folks obviously seem to be the ones using their infrastructure to get the vote out for Huckabee and attempt to shove down our throats a candidate who meets their agenda, but not the agenda for the rest of conservatives….
It is time for the evangelical Huckabee supporters to understand that Economic & Fiscal conservatives now get to make the same threat that Evangelicals made earlier. Evangelical Huckabee supporters don’t like Rudy because he’s pro-choice. Economic/Fiscal conservatives don’t like Huckabee (nor McCain for that matter) because these guys aren’t fiscal or economic conservatives at all…their records prove it.
Here are the ultimatums from both sides:
Nominate Rudy and Evangelicals abandon the GOP in Nov.
Nominate Huckabee (or McCain) and Econ/Fiscal conservatives abandon the GOP in Nov.
Either way – we all lose.
The solution, as Hawkins sees it, is Mitt Romney. God-o-Meter is not so sure South Carolina voters will feel the same way.
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