The Next President of the United States (cont.)

J. Peter Mulhern at American Thinker has an excellent article up, in which he expands on a couple key points I made earlier this month on the differences between Fred Thompson and Rudy Giuliani, and the effects their respective candidacies would have on the 2008 election.

1. On presidential candidates' insatiable appetite for pandering to the masses, Mulhern writes:

Thompson, unlike all the others, has important themes to project and can't be bothered to pick up a few supporters here and there by promising to serve the interests of those few at the expense of the many.

I couldn't agree more:

Because his campaign is based on a set of core principles and beliefs, and not a well-lubricated political weather vane, you won't see Fred out on the campaign trail one day pandering to a particular group of voters, only to whip around in a neck-snapping 180-degree turn to attract a different group of voters the next day.

Trying to be everything to everybody is a sure-fire recipe for disaster.

2. On the perverted notion that the GOP needs to swing left to attract potential Hillary Clinton supporters, Mulhern nails it.

This argument is a hardy perennial of conventional commentary, and it is utterly inane. You can't win by appealing to people who won't vote for you under any imaginable circumstances at the cost of alienating your core supporters. Trading a perfectly good cow for a handful of beans only makes sense in fairy tales.

[...]

With Rudy on the ballot millions of "values voters" would stay home. Millions more who are beguiled by socialism's promise of something for nothing but often vote for Republicans anyway because Democrats are just too weird, would vote for the Dem. With Giuliani as the candidate Republicans would limp into the fall of 2008, both feet riddled with self-inflicted bullet wounds.

This is pretty much what others and myself have outlined as the two disastrous electoral by-products of a Giuliani nomination.

1. The far-right conservative voters will stay home on election day to protest the party's nomination of someone who has abandoned conservative, small government principles in the interest of his own political ambition.

2. The middle-of-the-road voters, will either stay home, thinking there's no appreciable ideological difference between the two candidates, or go into the voting booth flipping a coin for the same reason, not really caring who gets elected.

I'll close with this excerpt from Mulhern's piece. Be sure to read the whole thing. It will be worth your while.

Fred Thompson isn't Ronald Reagan. But he can restore the Republican Party to Reagan's default settings. He can make the GOP once again the party of the American Revolution and distinguish it sharply from the party of the French, Russian, Chinese, and Cuban Revolutions.

Amen to that.