“While I do indeed believe in the importance of a big GOP tent, that tent must be built upon a shared agreement on the essentials - including expanding liberty, encouraging entrepreneurship and limiting the reach of government in people’s everyday lives.”
-Mark Sanford

He’s for a big tent, as well.

Of course, the most important point is that in the political reality we are living in, the GOP is not in trouble because we are insufficiently big tent, but because the GOP was hypocritical and didn’t take a stand, policy-wise, for our beliefs. No one’s going to support a party that doesn’t act on its professed values, Democrat or Republican. The hypocrisy is why the entire political establishment is held suspect in the eyes of the general public.

So, I don’t see the point in harping about the need to put “pragmatism over ideological purity” as if that hasn’t been the motivating factor behind GOP actions in the past 9 years. There’s no shortage of that principle in GOP politics today. Really.

Just look at supposed conservative rock star Cornyn on the Florida Senate race and tell me that pragmatism isn’t ruling the day over ideological purity.

I may be wrong, but to me it seems borderline paranoia to be worried about the GOP being insufficiently broad.

But here’s the distinction between those two and Barbour, which I think is important one: Barbour would put pragmatism before ideological purity and routinely speaks of the need for Republicans to accepts graduations of conservativism.. “For a party that got 60 percent of the vote for president in my lifetime, it is silly to think everyone is going to agree on everything. We are not. In a two-party system, both parties are coalitions. We are the conservative party of the United States; the Democrats are the liberal party of the United States. And within our party, there are going to be a lot of people who are not conservative enough to get elected to Congress from Sugarland, Texas,” he said at a recent Christian Science Monitor breafkast.

In short, Barbour acknowledges the need for Crists and Huntsmans if we’re ever to rebuild the party. I don’t see many of his potential opponents arguing the same.

Back it up.

unlike Palin and Sanford, stakes the reemergence of the Republican Party as a viable political force on the shoulders of inclusive, big tent policies

Examples of how Barbour’s approach differs from those of Palin and Sanford, please? You can’t just take a swipe like that and not back it up.

I’m pretty sure you have no idea what does and does not qualify as “testicular fortitude.”

Moreover, why is he not a “real conservative?” I’m sure you would be happy to know that Barbour was a central figure in preventing the US from adopting the Kyoto Protocol. And you also strike me as the tea-bagging type, so you should know he rejected Obama’s stimulus funds.

If you have the testicular fortitude to explain your comment, I’d be interested in hearing what you have to say.