The stupid party

New York Republicans got a rock in their trick-or-treat bags over the Halloween weekend, as Dede Scozzafava ripped off her million-dollar Republican mask and revealed herself to be a Democrat. It was never a very good disguise, but every previous attempt to peer beneath it was punished with stern lectures from Newt Gingrich and the rest of the party establishment. The bags of contributor money Republicans handed to the Scozzafava campaign would have been more usefully spent hiring detectives to trail ACORN operatives, and keep Democrat voter fraud down to manageable levels.

The Scozzafava campaign is the latest dreadful mistake from a party establishment enchanted by the mirage of the perfect moderate candidate. For Republican voters, it seems like every winter is the winter of their discontent. Many of the GOP’s boneheaded mistakes come from exactly the same source as the Democrats’ boneheaded mistakes: the tendency to believe the media action line about themselves. This produces arrogance in the Democrats, while the Republicans are like awkward, lovestruck teenagers – terrified the slightest bit of confident self-expression will blow their chances with the cute moderate in the pink sweater seated beside them in homeroom class. They suffer beneath the same irony that crushes every awkward teenager, since confident self-expression is exactly what is needed to connect with the object of their affections… assuming they’re not obsessing over someone they never had a chance with anyway.

Establishment mouthpieces trying to rationalize the Scozzafava debacle as a tactical maneuver, designed to win a liberal district by running a moderate candidate, can save their breath. The success of Doug Hoffman’s insurgent candidacy blows that argument out of the water. Even if he suffers a narrow loss on Tuesday, Hoffman has certainly proven himself competitive. Just imagine what he could have done with, oh, say about $900,000 in Republican party funding!

As it stands, Hoffman has already crushed one of the Democrats in the race, and stands poised to claim victory over the other  - and he did it with the help of all the conservative hobgoblins lurking within liberalism’s nightmare closet. While Newt Gingrich was droning through the third hour of his Power Point presentation, explaining why running the Card Check-supporting wife of a union thug was a brilliant political maneuver, Sarah Palin roared up in her 4×4 and shouted the obvious truth: voting for actual conservatives is the only way to clear away the Obama malaise.

Every district presents different political challenges, and there are places where both parties are compelled to run candidates who deviate from their core philosophy. The degree of deviance is the issue… particularly for the Republicans, whose core philosophy runs counter to the collectivist momentum of the past century. The Democrats certainly have problems with their mavericks, but usually only when they attempt to implement the most extreme policies, such as trapping America in the nightmare of state-run medicine. As long as the growth of the State bubbles along at Clinton levels, the “Blue Dog” Democrats are content to sit quietly on their porches, ignoring the Republicans waiting for them to bark.

Meanwhile, the Republicans keep running “moderates” who prove to be very useful to the Democrats… which keeps the growth of the State bubbling along at Bush levels.  The radical nature of the current Administration makes the idea of “moderate” compromise laughable. What’s the moderate position on freedom-crushing trillion-dollar health care and environmentalist legislation? They’re okay, as long as the Democrats pinky-swear to keep the cost under $800 billion? That’s the kind of promise no politician could keep, even if it was made in earnest. A moderate Republican is someone who lives in a state of perpetual surprise as he ponders the monthly bills for nanny-state government. What’s the point of electing people who are guaranteed to spend the rest of their political careers complaining about how they’ve been played for fools?

Too much of the Republicans’ “Stupid Party” strategy is based on the mechanics of getting people with little elephants on their campaign signs elected. They view the election as the conclusion of a contest, when in fact it’s only the beginning. A successful Republican Party doesn’t have to be ideologically rigid, but it should insist on candidates who possess an intellectual foundation of conservative theory, and the ability to explain it at least as well as the thousands of people posting comments on conservative blogs.

Republican voters would be well-advised to ignore the people who engineered the Scozzafava debacle, and listen for the sound of Sarah Palin’s monster truck instead. America needs conservatives more than it needs Republicans.  Both the party, and the country, benefit when they are one and the same.  Next Halloween, just to be on the safe side, we should test the blood of every “moderate” Republican with a hot wire and a petri dish, just to make sure we don’t have another DIABLO on our hands.

This post was promoted from GreenRoom to HotAir.com.
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