Ah - well therein you find the battle for the party!!! Conservatives are hoping to bring back conservatism to the Republican Party - but they will be opposed by the entrenched party elite who are much the same the equally entrenched party elite of the Democrats.
And once that wheel gets rolling, a similar and much-needed purging will take place within the Democrat Party...
There is no "battle for the party". That was my point, after all the faux high minded "real small government conservatism", those conservatives STILL lap up the GW Bush corporatism and the macho Dick Cheney cartoon foreign policy.
Hell, even social conservatives try to pretend that they are "small government". They make up the talking point that the founding fathers wanted to "defend traditional morality", and that anything they don't like is giving in to "anarchy".
"Bring back conservatism to the Republican Party"? Like the pragmatic realism of (most of) the Reagan presidency? Reagan did virtually nothing for conservatives other than nominate Robert Bork, who was so "small government" that he wanted to censor the media, and approved of laws regulating contraception.
The last "real conservative" in the GOP was Calvin Coolidge.
Doug
P.S. Just ranting a little, not intending at all to trash you personally.