People hate govt. But they like roads. They like firefighters. They like having police. They like courts and jails. They like medical schools and public hospitals. They like public universities. They like universal education. They like having a military. They really don't see how this country could operate without laws and government.

The republicans have proven, definitively, that they cannot govern.

And yet, he was nominated. He even made a dent back in 2000. If the Republican tent were as small as Arlen Specter would have you believe, none of those guys would've made it past square one.

Successful politicians and/or political movements are not built on watering down your message for the purposes of mass appeal. They are built on persuading people who might otherwise disagree with you that your position is the right/best one.

The Republican tent doesn't need to be bigger--it's plenty big and there's room to spare. It needs to re-establish what it stands for, and convince more people to come inside.

Those are the very examples being given by the conservative rank and file right now for "purifying" their party. Thank you for proving his point. The party that helped Specter in 2004 won lots of elections. This version of the party finds only 21% of Americans claiming they are affiliated with them.

Precisely.

Sorry- you only accept that he has ideas if those ideas don't cost any money to implement?

And the Republicans have taken a 3-point lead in the generic Congressional poll.

The party now is not so different from what it was in 2004, except it now has no public face (normal, when a party just lost the White House with no clear successor). Conservatives didn't kick Specter out of the party. He left it, a long time ago actually.

People like it all. Give me everything for nothing. Or take it from somebody else.

The process is grossly unreasonable as it is. Nobody wants to pay for it. So why doesn't any of the electorate curtail what we expect from government?

Even the hardest core libertarians aren't against roads, police, jails and national defense. The republicans have never been that anti-government. But their problem now is that at least on government size and economic issues they're not that much different than the socialist leaning dems. That's why they seem to have no message right now other than social issues and war, which are not resonating.

But they are against the other things I mentioned?

and that is part of Mike's hyperbole. Most people agree on minimal level of government services, but the politics of it all is that many politicians divert from primary activities to secondary activities in order to create a need for the primary activities and functions of government. It's a vicious cycle. Don't pay for the roads, pay for the pork first, and then say, "see Reps aren't paying for the roads."