re: #674 iceweasel

Until the right gets its act together, they’re going to keep losing.

Agree one-hundred percent.

Ideas don’t matter so much as the war of ideas— the strategy, the method. Sad, but true.

Couldn’t disagree more. Disagree one-hundred percent. In fact, check yoour front door. You hear that THWOCK!, and you’ll know it is this note, impaled on a flaming arrow, being delivered.
Good ideas are the only way the Republicans can ever win. Reagan had them in 1980, and Newt Gingrich (don’t grimace like that, he was *right*) had them in 1994.
I don’t know where “Compassionate Conservatism” came from, unless it was a DNC plot to paint conservatism as uncompassionate, but the only reason we won in 2000 was that VP Gore could not get far enough away from President Clinton’s damaged brand. Even then, it was famously close.
2004 was simple.
I do expect that some professionalism be applied to the business of campaigning, but the method must not be prioritized over the message, or we wind up with a rightist demagogue—beholden to the polls, shifting with the angry currents swirling about his knees, rather than holding a steady course for the far shore.