One of the reasons why the conservative vote is split is not because the Reagan coalition has gone away.

You have basically three legs of the conservative stool. There’s subsets of this, but you’ve got the economic, the fiscal; you’ve got the social; and you got the foreign policy conservatives.

Among these foreign policy conservatives — these are the neocon guys — they believe in a big government. They believe in big, active executive, compassionate conservatism. They love this.

That’s why they like McCain. He’s a big government guy.

Without anybody in this race that has all three of those legs firmly understood, then the conservatives all over these states and all these primaries are splitting off one of those three legs. Like the social conservatives, a lot of them are going Huckabee because he’s a minister, because of abortion. The economic conservatives, a lot of people are going to Romney — and those are the small government types. The foreign policy national security conservatives, those are the most important ones, those are the ones going to McCain.

Of course, he’s picking up independents and moderates as well, and so the reason for this fracture is because there’s not one candidate that incorporates all three legs of the stool.

You look for the best of the options. Whoever is the last standing in this race is going to be the one that we dislike the least.

It’s just as simple as that.

You have to fight for what you believe.

This fight never ends because liberalism is never going away, and there are always going to be Republicans who are not conservative, and there are always going to be Republicans who are moderates and so forth. But all of these things are all part of the mix. The disappointment of the Republican Party or a large portion of it was palpable when Reagan lost in that convention and Gerald Ford won. Ford was a likable guy. There wasn’t a lot of animus to Ford. He was just an establishment guy. He wasn’t conservative. Reagan was where the future was. Reagan was excitement. Everybody wanted the future now. We had to wait four years — and, arguably, Carter.

You could say that Jimmy Carter played a large role in so wrecking the country, in so destroying it. You talk about being humiliated and embarrassed in the world? Nobody’s done a better job of that for this country than Jimmy Carter! So it may well be that a President McCain or a President Hillary is what it takes to forge a conservative candidate who incorporates all three legs of our stool.