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Something Or Nothing?

By: itsonlywords (Diary)  |  September 19th, 2009 at 08:45 PM  | 

RESIZE: AAA

(A new post from the blogger formerly know as paulag1955. I’ve changed my name to be consistent with my Twitter ID.)

Since I posted this piece at It’s Only Words about financially supporting conservative candidates and Erick Erickson posted a similar piece here the same day, I’ve seen a few comments based on the idea that if only candidates were “conservative enough” people would support them.

Whatever.

Didn’t your mother ever ask you, “What’s better, something or nothing?” When you’re talking about cookies, the answer seems fairly obvious but apparently it gets fuzzy when you’re talking about candidates. It would be nice to have “perfect” conservative candidates in every race at every level (and don’t even get me started on how we’d define “perfect”), but last time I checked, Jesus wasn’t even remotely interested in running for office. Meanwhile, we have to make do with actual humans. Humans whose views may not coincide exactly with our own on every issue.

Get over it.

I can understand the appeal of allocating your dollars based on principle, but in a two-party system, the time for that is in the primaries. (Although here in Washington, with our misguided top-two primary system, standing on principle even in the primaries may be a luxury we can no longer afford.) Now that the primaries are over, we need to identify the candidates who are most closely aligned with our beliefs and rally around them, where “rally around” means supporting them with our time and our wallets – even if those candidates aren’t really as conservative as we might like, because in the majority of cases, the alternative is far worse.

Cross posted at It’s Only Words.

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COMMENTS

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  • http://www.nighttwister.com NightTwister

    Our primaries aren’t until next August. They really have primaries more than a year before the General election in Washington?

    • http://itsonlywords55.wordpress.com itsonlywords

      Heh, primaries for some local races…King County Executive, Seattle Major, some city/county council races.

  • http://itsonlywords55.wordpress.com itsonlywords

    In Washington (and this was primarily written for Washington readers) we don’t really see a lot of moderate Democrats. A Dave Reichert may look indistinguishable from a Democrat in some other states, but many, many residents of Western Washington would actually consider him to be quite conservative.

  • http://hillbillypolitics.com Steph C

    The problem is nominally something or nothing. What’s the point if the only difference between a Democrat and a Republican is the letter beside their names?

    That’s what the party gives and keeps telling us we have to support while the conservative candidates who get elected in spite of the squishes are pushed to the side or deemed irrelevant.

  • http://itsonlywords55.wordpress.com itsonlywords

    In Washington, we elect Republicans like Dave Reichert who vote the conservative position just over half the time so, yes, you could say that the only difference between him and a Democrat is the “R” behind his name. But if the alternative is an extreme leftist nut like Darcy Burner, who would undoubtedly have been yet another Washington State Congressperson who voted the conservative position 2% of the time, people need to get over their distaste of backing a moderate and back a moderate.

    Burner out fund-raised Reichert $4.3 to $2.8 million. Reichert will have a stronger challenger in 2010, I hear, so he is going to need financial backing from conservatives or that seat will be lost to the leftist fringe. (I do expect him to have a challenger in the primary due to his ARRA vote, but it remains to be seen who that will be.)

    And if conservatives want to see the GOP back more conservative candidates, they, again, need to open their wallets and back them strongly during the primary season to prove they can raise money. Eventually the GOP will get the point. It seems crass that our political system is so strongly driven by the dollar. I don’t like it, but that’s the way it is.

  • http://hillbillypolitics.com Steph C

    I have a problem with that. Giving to individual candidates based on a conservative record works much better for me. I don’t have a lot of money to throw around thanks to a lackluster elitist GOP and their big government policies going hand in hand with Democrats’ bigger government policies.

    I depend on this site to point me to conservative candidates and Erick E. has done an admirable job of it. The GOP, on the other hand, is still preaching appeasement to their Democratic overlords… that kinder compassionate conservatism (a thing that doesn’t exist in reality). While we’re appeasing, the country loses. We can’t afford to lose much more than we have already.