Quote:

---

Pat Robertson's agitated speech on today's 700 Club indicates that he appreciates the Romney model, in which candidates recognize that there will in fact be general elections following primaries. From Right Wing Watch:

Quote:

---

I believe it was Lyndon Johnson that said, ‘Don't these people realize if they push me over to an extreme position I'll lose the election? And I'm the one who will be supporting what they want but they're going to make it so I can't win.' Those people in the Republican primary have got to lay off of this stuff. They're forcing their leaders, the frontrunners, into positions that will mean they lose the general election. Now whether this did it to Cain I don't know, but nevertheless, you appeal to the narrow base and they'll applaud the daylights out of what you're saying and then you hit the general election and they say ‘no way' and then the Democrat, whoever it is, is going to just play these statements to the hilt. They've got to stop this! It's just so counterproductive!

---

So now you've heard it from Pat Robertson, top evangelical: Don't just "appeal to the narrow base" because "they'll applaud the daylights out of what you're saying," because that's what fools do. http://gawker.com/5852824/pat-robertson-is-worried-about-republicans-b
eing-too-extreme he's saying is "Shhh, don't talk about that stuff out loud, you idiots, until you get ELECTED", because:

Quote:

---

Robertson does not reject the content of extremist positions themselves; his objection is that the extreme views that appeal to their far-right base will cost the Republicans the general election. What’s bad about extremism, apparently, is not the radical nature of these opinions as much as the fact that you can’t win the presidency if you espouse them. As he noted on his program, “Those people in the Republican primary have got to lay off of this stuff. They’re forcing their leaders, the frontrunners, into positions that will mean they lose the general election.”

Robertson is right about that, at least. Just ask Barry Goldwater. Tea Party denizens today are very fond of carrying signs at their rallies that quote Barry Goldwater’s famous phrase from his 1964 speech accepting the Republican presidential nomination: “I would remind you that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice.”

They should also be reminded that Barry Goldwater lost that election.

President Lyndon Johnson, the Democratic candidate, successfully used Goldwater’s “extremism” line to paint Goldwater as just crazy enough to start a nuclear war in the famous “Daisy ad.”

Crazy still doesn’t play well in general elections according to knowledgeable political strategists. Karl Rove just cautioned Rick Perry against flirting with birtherism, as Perry apparently did over the weekend in an interview published online. Rove cautioned, “You associate yourself with a nutty view like that, and you damage yourself…it starts to marginalize you in the minds of some of the people whom you need in order to get the election.”

So, both Karl Rove and Pat Robertson agree that “nutty” and “extreme” are bad for winning elections. http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/guest-voices/post/pat-robertson-do
nt-take-extremism-to-extremes/2011/10/24/gIQAU1jMFM_blog.html Stewart had a ball with it. Have a giggle: http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/tue-october-25-2011/indecision-2012-
--the-great-right-hope---the-180-club (Catch it starting at 4:00)

On a similar note, catch this, it's even better: http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/tue-october-25-2011/indecision-2012-
--the-great-right-hope---tone-def-comedy-jam

Ahhhh, Jon, what WOULD we do without you?