… well, there is no such thing. Candidates are real people with mouths, experience, presented ideologies, and possibly hidden agendas, unmentioned crimes, and all that rot.
But if you want a generalization, far-right pundit Erick Erickson’s speaking a truth you’ll want to hear, in the context of the announced, but not yet accomplished, resignation of Rep Ken Buck (R-CO) from Congress:
[Buck’s] Heritage Action lifetime scorecard is 91%.
The Club For Growth rates him with a lifetime score of 98%.
CPAC gives him a lifetime rating of 97%.
But he is leaving Congress because Ken Buck has failed to dance like a chained monkey with cymbals for a base that wants entertainment instead of wins. The clown chorus of conservatism is vilifying a guy who has consistently voted for the conservative side over 90% of the time.
Those “scores” are only impressive to other, serious conservatives; for liberals, the effect is rather opposite. And the clown chorus of conservatives?
They’re, to be honest, the lost souls produced by a conservative movement that trained the base to not be serious. They are told to vote straight ticket, to win-win-win, to treat politics as a game, rather than a serious business. Primary candidates and their backers toss around ludicrous accusations, lies about themselves or their favored candidate, and pump up their own ego by repeated claims that their far-right extremist adversary is a Republican In Name Only (RINO), implying that the guy with white supremacist inclinations is … a … liberal.
Erickson’s divergence from reality is, as many pundits have pointed out, the adherence of today’s typical Republican to Mr. Trump and the power structure of their fellows in relationship to Mr. Trump. That’s their number one priority, and they’ve been trained for it, from their evangelical or libertarian roots to their shared victimhood to, I rather suspect, the government duplicity implicit in the Pentagon Papers (see their anti-vaccination attitudes).
Erickson wants to drag them back to a reality where the litmus test is not the loyalty to Mr. Trump, and the implicit criticisms of government and liberalism he embodies, but stances on abortion, imposition of other religious values, taxation, regulation, etc.
I do not think Erickson’s going to achieve that goal. The toxic culture which Gingrich, etc, have constructed for conservatives has produced a monster that will have to fall apart, as it seems to be doing, before Erickson can hope to have his conservatives back.
And it’s worth noting his rigidity on the matter, from above:
… who has consistently voted for the conservative side over 90% of the time.
It’s a statement that, if read closely and with no allowances for the sloppy expressions rife in blogging and, indeed, much of this era, entirely embodies an arrogance and a belief that this is all a game with a well-defined endpoint, rather than an enterprise of impressive complexity: governance.
Keep that in mind when reading any pundit, even an amateur such as myself.
