Submitted by John House, Feb 9, 2008 19:59

The Republican party has had an impressive series of electoral and legislative successes in past decades. It seems to lose momentum only when influenced by one group: neoconservatives.

Republicans can thank John Bolton, Donald Rumsfeld and their comrades for the ill-conceived and poorly executed Iraq campaign on the heels of a widely popular and successful campaign in Afganistan.

We can also thank the likes of Rush Limbaugh and Laura Ingraham for their contribution to illegal immigration, an embarrassing defeat of the harshest penalties for illegal immigrants and employers to hire them to date. Yep, those were the harshest penalties to date, but Rush and Laura started whining about amnesty, and George Bush had support from no one.

I haven't discussed Ann Coulter yet. All I can say is this is the woman who started her solo career by insulting a combat veterans for tripping their own mines. Fact is, the mines had been reengineered and repositioned by the Viet Cong. John McCain should pray in thanks that she openly supports Hillary Clinton.

All of these people have something in common. They have never won an election. They have never run for election. When one of their camp, Alan Keyes, ran against Barak Obama for Senate, he received a whopping 18% of the vote, and I suspect they would match his performance.

Their unpopularity arises from their inability to leverage minority support to grow a base. Most people who oppose abortion support Social Security as a concept. Many who support fiscal conservatism are ambivalent to a militaristic foreign policy or a pro life legislative agenda. Other fiscal conservatives are wary of Fundamentalism in the classroom because their background in biological sciences shows it is simplistic. Fundamentalists have an offsetting concern that secular society wants to educate youth to regard Fundamentalists as socially irrelevant.

However, each of the views described can be called conservative. A successful conservative government will reduce the contradictions and negotiate their coexistence. I hope John McCain and Mike Huckabee understand this reality. They can thank the self-proclaimed conservative celebrities for putting them in an underdog position.

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