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Politics : President Barack Obama -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: ChinuSFO who wrote (55126)	6/1/2009 3:17:24 PM
From: TimF	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 149317

But then they need to take the lead and the elected leaders that they are, they need to tell Limbaugh to shut up if Limbaugh wants to help them. Beyond a certain point helping them becomes less important, assuming one is more ideologically conservative than partisan Republican. If you care more about ideas and principles then you care about the party label, a strong move to the center can be a bad thing even if it causes the party you usually support to gain support. If Republicans abandon what caused many to support them, then the only remaining reason to vote for them is to try and keep the Democrats out. If the move away from conservative principles is strong enough than even keeping Democrats out (assuming its possible, and on a national scale right now it isn't), might not clearly be a gain. Moving to the middle can make sense at times, but it can also amount to alienating your base without picking up more support. For example if Republicans called for higher marginal tax rates, it would be unlikely to gain them anything, as people who want higher taxes (either in general or just for relatively wealthy people) tend to vote for Democrats. Sometimes moving to the middle doesn't shift the debate much, doesn't cause you to lose too much of your base, and allows you to pick up from the middle. That could be a win from a partisan perspective, and if it means avoiding a win by a party hostile to your ideology it can be a win, or at least not a loss, from an ideological perspective. But that combination doesn't always occur. The move can fail to pick up many votes from them middle, or it can lose too many votes from the base, or it can shift the debate, so that the positions you've moved to, which where the old middle, are now considered to be to the side of a new middle which has shifted away from you. In that last scenario a shift to the middle is essentially a preemptive concession for no gain.