I think his point is its better to have a majority, even if enough of that majority doesn't vote in line with the parties views 30-40% of the time that it could cause problems, is better than not having a majority and thus running moderate republicans rather than solid republicans in blue states where there's a decent shot of winning said state that way.
My issue is...that's the exact strategy we were doing for the past decade which happened to be the time I've been most unhappy with how Republicans in power have acted and been, so I'm not exactly keen on it. I'm willing to detox in hopes of being fully healthy rather than just continue to feed the addiction in hopes of not having any extremely bad days but realizing there's not going to be really any good days either. The latter is Dav's preference.
That's a pretty odd and irrelevant comparison, there.
Your problem, I think, is assuming that the GOP should have one single strategy everywhere. It's great that they are knocking off establishment incumbents in favor of more conservative challengers, as they've been doing in Utah and Alaska and Florida and even Pennsylvania. But it's foolish to think that this is a good idea
everywhere; just because Florida will vote for a Marco Rubio doesn't mean Delaware will. And if this strategy had been applied to Massachussetts back in January, Scott Brown (a moderate) would never have won, and that whole debacle would never have happened. So just because Republicans should act differently than they have for the last 10 years doesn't mean that acknowledging basic political facts was what went wrong with them.
If I'm going to vote based on principle, I'm going to cast the vote that will make the officeholer someone with principles closest to mine. In Delaware, that would have meant voting for Castle, because the alternative would be to vote for the Democrat to win. Frankly, I could see why I might vote for O'Donnell there if I saw Castle and Coons as being almost
exactly the same... but there is a
huge difference between them.
There's also the fact that if conservatives are going to nominate a Tea Party candidate, especially in a purple or blue state where it's a risky proposition, they should make sure it's a
good Tea Party candidate... which O'Donnell is not. It's bad enough what's happening with Angle in Nevada, and Nevada is significantly less blue than Delaware. And as far as I can tell, Castle is a fairly principled moderate, more Scott Brown-esque than Arlen Specter-esque. If Scott Brown can be considered a "Tea Party" candidate, I don't see why Castle can't be, especially since many conservative complaints about him (his stances on abortion, gun rights, Bush's conduct during the Iraq War) have little or nothing to do with what the Tea Party supposedly stands for.
