Posted on '08 Election, Conservatives, Republicans

thanks fred

Huckabee and his people are blaming Fred Thompson for their second-place finish in South Carolina.

Anyone else notice that we aren’t seeing much of that smiley positive Huck lately? Fred took quite a few votes from Huck, and I’m proud to say that I contributed to that effort. It wasn’t enough votes to get into the top two, so that was probably Fred’s last stand in this race. But if all he did was switch the focus back to conservative principles (and derail Huck), it was more than enough. I don’t regret voting for Fred, and I don’t think anyone else does either. I don’t do strategy votes. I vote for the person who I believe would be a good representative of our party and of conservative principles when facing off against the Democrats in November.

I don’t care that Fred being in the race may have helped McCain. That wasn’t intentional on my part (or on Fred’s). There are many good reasons why I couldn’t vote for McCain, no matter what his numbers were against the Democrats. I also don’t like the idea of independents and moderates choosing the Republican nominee. Those two groups are giving McCain an unfair advantage in a primary process that should ensure that the nominee is picked by the majority of the REPUBLICAN party. I hope that’s the way it turns out in the end.

I know that the delegate count is the all-important number, but to call McCain’s 3 point victory over Huckabee a sign that he’s now the frontrunner — forget it. He got 33% of the vote here. Huckabee got 30%. That means quite a few people voted against those two. Unfortunately, it wasn’t enough to keep McCain from winning. The problem is that the anti-McCain vote was divided between Huck, Romney, and Fred. Fred was unable to sell himself as THE alternative, and as long as conservatives couldn’t decide on one guy to represent them, this is the result we get.

Please, fellow conservatives, do not blame us for this result. We did all we could to stop it. Now it’s up to the other states to find us an acceptable nominee.

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