Sanford says the best way for the GOP to grow and become a national contender once again is to regroup and start disenfranchising party members who don't believe everything the party supposedly stands for and don't think in unison.
In this regard, the tent cannot be so big as to include political franchisees who don’t act on the core tenets of conservatism — and as a consequence harm the brand and undermine others’ work on it.Those who have any form of dissent or any form of an open mind will not be allowed in future GOP tents. How is this a change from Bush's GOP? It's not. It's just a way for Sanford to blame the GOP collapse on non-believers instead of on movement conservative ideology.
Sanford's biggest challenge to the GOP is to look to the state's for answers and not to the federal government. He then lists some up-and-coming Republican governors as examples of bona fide conservatism, Bobby Jindal, Sarah Palin, Mitch Daniels, etc.,.
As if their respective states don't take federal money; quite the contrary actually. Bobby Jindal's state is the biggest recipient of federal dollars except if we include Sarah Palin's state of Alaska as a member of the Union. Those two governors alone lobby for and accept more federal tax payer money than most states combined. Yet in Gov. Sanford's make-believe world those are grand examples of bona fide conservative governors because they are looking inward rather than towards Washington.
As long as Republicans keep writing op-eds like Sanford's and keep believing such Fantasy World ideas then the GOP is in even worse shape come 2010.
