Regarding all the talk going around about the G.O.P. having to move to the left to regain lost ground, David Limbaugh counters:...It's true that a recent Washington Post/ABC News poll shows that only 21 percent of Americans now identify themselves as Republicans, compared with 35 percent as Democrats and 38 percent as independents. But there's a huge difference between party identification and ideological identification.
The bipartisan Battleground Poll, as recently as Aug. 20, 2008, revealed that 60 percent of Americans identify themselves as conservative and only 36 percent as liberal.
So it's the Republican Party that's in trouble, not conservatism. The GOP's shrinkage can't be because it's too conservative. George W. Bush, our most recent Republican president, was hardly an extreme conservative. His most outspoken critics today include wide swaths of conservatives who decried his failure to rein in federal spending and control illegal immigration, among other things.
And the GOP's 2008 presidential candidate, John McCain, was hardly a staunch conservative, either, lest he would never have been the liberal media's favorite Republican. McCain didn't lose because of any extreme conservatism. Nor did Obama win because he was honest about his liberalism, which he denied every time he was confronted about it...
No, the direction for numerical growth, renewed energy and practical ideas for the Republican party will not come from imitating the Carter/Clinton/Pelosi/Obama disaster, it will come from "conserving" the ideals of America's founding fathers.
