Patrick Ruffini has a poll up asking the Fredheads which candidate will we support if Fred drops out of the race and since he didn’t list Fred Thompson, I chose Romney 🙂 Romney is currently winning the poll by a wide margin. He has 73%!
I choose Romney because even though he is a serial flip-flopper and Clinton, Kerry and Gore all rolled up into one candidate, Huckabee has his own set of problems including flip-flopping. I believe that we can’t afford another “compassionate conservative” in the White House. The conservative movement has lost it’s way and we don’t need to have it be further co-oped by those who don’t understand that conservatism is already compassionate at it’s core. Promoting class warfare creates strife and resentment and what we need is a message of unity and hope. And no I don’t think Romney will be the candidate who will unite this party behind our core principles but I know that Huckabee won’t. But at least Romney isn’t bringing division to the party the way the Huckabee is and he isn’t offering a new brand of conservatism and his campaign manager (or whatever position Ed Rollins holds) isn’t out to destroy the Reagan coalition.
Plus, I don’t like the Republican party tied so completely to the church. It’s not good for the party but more importantly it’s not good for Christianity. It’s been bad enough with Bush but it will be so much worse now since Huckabee has advertised he’s a “Christian leader” and made it one of the issues of his campaign. All of his actions as president will reflect on Christ and his church, I’m not sure I trust him to always keep that in mind (his flip-flopping on issues, his saying he won’t go negative and then doing so, his inability to turn the other cheek, do not reflect well on his Christianity, plus he lacks precision when talking about church and state issues that cause some to think he was to set up a theocracy). And I don’t like the division and resentment that he’s brought to the party. He’s aimed his candidacy at gathering Christian support at the exclusion of the rest of the Republican party. He only gets about 9% of the non-evangelical vote. How do you win a general election with just evangelicals? And in SC he only got 40% of their vote.
OK, so do we really want a candidate who pits the poor and middle class against the rich and their boss (“do you to elect the guy that fired you…”) and who excludes everyone who “doesn’t speak the language of Zion” from his campaign running as our party’s spokesman in November. Does this really sound like the conservative message?
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