Now that most of the primary elections are over, we know that Democrat incumbents will be facing a variety of Republican opponents---some viewed as the "tea party" candidate, and some viewed as more "establishment" Republicans. Of course, I welcome the chance to vote for just about any Republican, in the hope that they can reverse much of the damage that has been done largely by the Democrats in the last 2 years and over the last 75 years. However, even though I am quite conservative and agree with much of what tea party candidates say, I worry about one thing when I see them---that this is where all the Ron Paul supporters went. I attended the 2008 GOP convention in my state and witnessed the Ron Paul supporters, which were Libertarian if they were anything, trying to force Ron Paul on the Republican delegates as the nominee. When they didn't get that, they tried to stuff a bunch of antiwar statements on to the GOP platform. They were smart enough to figure out that having an "R" rather than an "L" by Ron Paul's name would significantly help him in the general election, even if he didn't deserve it.
Ron Paul, I'm sure, is a nice guy, and I probably would agree with him on many things. But where I think the feds should be doing less, spending less, and returning to first principles, he and his followers think that the feds shouldn't really be doing anything, including pretty clear-cut cases for national defense. They also waste a great deal of time focusing on things like eliminating the Federal Reserve and the Department of Education. True, I might agree with them philosophically, but can we please put it pretty low down on the priority list? Can we please go after the "low hanging fruit" first that just about every American agrees on, like repealing or starving this monstrosity that is the new healthcare bill?
I'm not saying don't vote for the tea party Republican if you have one in your race---far from it. Please do. The Democrats must lose the election for their highly unpopular, incredibly reckless behavior. But when those tea partiers get to office, don't be so "mavericky" that your first priority is to introduce a bill to eliminate the Federal Reserve. We can debate that after we have fixed the far, far, far more egregious and universally unpopular things first.
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BTW, I think that this strategy has also been employed by the people on the left as well. Those that would be far more accurate to describe themselves as Green Party, or Socialist, or Communist, have figured out that they can't win elections that way. They are then making some of their more outlandish platform planks sufficiently vague during their primary and general election campaigns to pass as Democrats. But once elected they will govern according to their "real" beliefs.
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