Who Comes First?

In the war between social and fiscal conservatives the question on everyone's mind is: who (or what) comes first? Lawrence Reed may have an answer.

“If you politically win on all the economic issues, you could lose on all the social ones and still have an avenue as a social conservative to advance what’s important to you,” Reed said. “When there’s a smaller government, families, individuals, private, voluntary organizations and churches have a bigger role. It’s on the strength of those institutions, not mandates from the government, that allow for a healthy culture to blossom."

Ah. But the social conservatives have an issue with that.

Social conservative Bob Patterson of the Howard Center for Family, Religion and Society thinks Americans must focus on social issues first, and that’s the main difference between social and fiscal conservatives. He said economic conservatives have traditionally been a lot better than social conservatives at furthering their interests, though.

I think Mr. Patterson has given us a clue. Unwittingly. Fiscal conservatism without the social conservative trappings is the bigger tent. i.e. more likely to win elections.

But I'm willing to run the experiment again. Let the social conservatives start passing laws or continuing government caused disasters (putting the distribution of some drugs solely in the hands of criminals) and we shall see if they can keep winning elections.

I mean what the heck? Two, or four, or six, or eight years of communists in power would be worth it to find the outcome of the experiment. How bad could it hurt?

We did run the experiment in Illinois a while back. The year was 2004. Given the choice between a flaming socon who disowned his lesbian daughter and a communist in 2004 I voted for the communist.

And the name of the communist? You might have heard of him.

Obama.

Other than that race I voted straight R.

BTW I wasn't the only one:

Obama/Keyes vs Kerry/Bush.

But if socons want to try that on a national level I say go for it. Maybe they will learn something. The hard way.

Cross Posted at Classical Values