Invoking the Reagan Zombie

I thought that in politics, when you're the front runner, you should only be paying attention to #2. That the mid-tier guys are pretty much negligible.

Well, no one told Mitt Romney that:

Republican presidential hopeful Mitt Romney blasted a rising challenger in the Iowa caucuses Monday, painting former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee as a tax-raising, illegal immigrant-coddling liberal and defending his own commitment to conservative causes.

"He may be conservative on social issues, but when it comes to economic issues like immigration, he's a liberal on immigration. He fought for tuition breaks for illegal aliens. He raised taxes time and time again as governor of Arkansas," Romney told CNN.

Oh no! A Republican candidate that isn't conservative across the board? What will the GOP do?

Seriously; is this the best Romney can do? I mean, look at George W. Bush: as president he failed to get an amendment on Gay Marriage like he promised (to the "values voters") his war has shattered our standing in the world (much to the dismay of the Republican-leaning libertarians) and up until the Democrats took power in 2006, there wasn't a spending bill he didn't like (I'm sure fiscal conservatives love talking about that one).

Hmmm...when you look at it, it appears that Bush was a fraud. You could make the case that he paid lip service to various conservative factions in order to get into the White House and used the office to make him and his old buddies rich. Helping out the "movement" that Reagan supposedly started was really an afterthought (just ask Karl Rove) .

In other words: it's not important who's more conservative in what area because (as the polls show) none of these guys is universally appealing to their conservative base...and being universally appealing is the only way to get the bases' seal of approval. It's not like, say, a union, where the people vote and if the majority (like 60%) leans toward a candidate, s/he gets the nod. Nope...for the conservative side it's a Laundry List of Impossibility; a manifest that no mortal (yes, even Ronald Reagan) could ever live up to and still be heavily involved in politics.

The silliness of this exercise will be magnified when one of these yahoos gets the GOP nod, and then fight like crazy to move to the middle (assuming there still is a middle nowadays).