More Zo!

Some words from Macho-Sauce Man:

Via D.C. Thornton, who took care of me for a week while I toiled in the vineyards of Clark County, Nevada, attempting to undo some of the damage my fellow Californians seem to have accomplished in what is still, in many ways, the freest state of the Union.

If need be, the entire Free West may retreat into Utah and Arizona, but I don't think it'll have to: Nevada will go red again. It must.

Thornton says he isn't getting the "Keyes vibe": I kinda feel the same about Huckabee. I'm not a red-meat girl on illegal immigration, but a lot of my political allies are. My problem with Huckabee was his tax-and-spend leanings. I truly understand that there's a lot to be said for a politician who is also a musician—does anyone doubt the impact of Bill Clinton playing the sax, wearing dark sunglasses, on the Arsenio Hall show during the 1992 campaign?—but that is frosting on the charisma cake.

And from the libertarian (if not libertine) side of the party, I'd submit that Rudy Giuliani has every bit as much appeal as Huckabee does; he is a compelling speaker. But he is at the other end of the party—considered a RINO for quite different, largely complementary, reasons.

The trick is to find someone who has charisma—the "delivery system," as Zo puts it—but doesn't carry any baggage that is truly alienating to the base (open support for choice in Rudy's case; immigration and tax policy in Huckabee's).

We need someone who is popular without being a populist, and it turns out to be a taller order than we thought.

I think we do need fresh blood: Palin is a good start, and we know Louisiana is going to lose Jindal sooner or later, for the good of the country (preferably after fixing the systemic problems in Louisiana). But there are a lot of bright people out there, and we need to cultivate their talent, while studying the things Axelrod did right, and continuing to garner wisdom from the old hands on our side, such as Rove and Gingrich; those guys have been through the political wars, and we need to listen to them as we recruit new talent.

In California, the task is drastically different: our party is very bifurcated here, and we need to continue to find people like Schwarzenegger and Riordan who can bridge the divide between the Christians in the Central Valley and San Diego and the Log Cabin folks in West Hollywood, who are "out" in their sexual orientations—but not in their politics.

We might start by getting Tammy Bruce to admit that the letter after her name looks a lot less like a "D" these days, and more like an "R." And by reminding the party's right wing that Goldwater didn't disown his gay son—any more than Cheney disowned his gay daughter. Any more than Catholic voters turned on Reagan because of his divorce, or evangelicals abandoned him for not attending church on a regular basis.

How do we keep the tent big without watering down our message? We do it by focusing on three key issues: security/defense/foreign policy, economics, and civil liberties such as speech rights, privacy, and gun rights (and the seemingly irrelevant right to smoke and eat foods that contain sugar and trans-fats: once we concede to the state that it can monitor our health, we have declared what we are, and are simply haggling over the price).

"Stay safe, and shoot straight."