Contract = Good, Checklist = Bad

There's now some talk from the RNC about a 'purity test' of sorts for conservative candidates in the 2010 election. Here's the nutshell:

Ten Republican National Committee members are distributing a plan to impose a purity test – calling for money to be withheld from anyone who disagrees with conservative principles on more than two of 10 core issues.

While this may sound like a good idea, something like what the GOP did so successfully in 1994, in practice it's really a bad, bad idea. Erick Erickson explains:

Rome long ago stopped selling indulgences, but conservatives keep right on selling them. Look, for example, at NY-23. The moment Dede Scozzafava signed ATR’s no new tax pledge, she was absolved of all her sins, including voting for 198 tax increases in the New York legislature.

Therein lies the inherent problem with candidates signing off on well meaning pablum — there are no teeth and the party will not serve as its own enforcer.

While I applaud the desire of conservative RNC members to try to put the train back on the tracks, I am afraid this will do what the ATR pledge did in Scozzafava’s case — give a lot of candidates cover to pretend to be conservative. People are naturally inclined to short circuit educational processes. People will look at this list to see if a candidate signed off on the issues. If the candidate did, well by God they must be conservative — never mind their voting record or prior statements. After all, only a week before Scozzafava signed the ATR pledge she was bashing Hoffman for having signed it. Never mind though, all was forgiven once Scozzafava signed it too.

Conservatives in the RNC, however well meaning they may be, risk giving liberal candidates easy opportunities to get conservative endorsements simply by checking the box without ever meaning it.

Compare this to the Contract With America in 1994. That document had ten items that were substantive policy positions heavily poll tested and vetted to make sure something like 70% of the American public agreed with each one. Each statement was popular and therefore did not put candidates in awkward positions with voters, as some of the presently suggested issues do. And while there was no enforcement mechanism there either, there did not have to be — every issue was poll tested, mother approved, and voter supported.

Not so with this. And because this, unlike the Contract With America, might affect funding and seals of approval in the primary process, this becomes far more troublesome.

Put more simply, Philip Klein says this:

Practically, many of the principles are too subjective. For instance, one principle is "Legal immigration and assimilation into American society by opposing amnesty for illegal immigrants" ... How would [this] be judged? Even most Democrats would say they oppose amnesty, but the devil is in the details. Some people would say that making illegal immigrants legal is not amnesty if there are enough fines and hoops to jump through to become legalized, while others believe that anything short of deportation is amnesty.

But beyond the practical aspect, this sort of thing is exactly the wrong message for conservatives to send to possible candidates. Candidates who merely regurgitate a set of pre-selected ideas to conform with the diktats of the national party will not do anything to advance conservatism. What conservatism needs is more thoughtful candidates who have a grounding in policy, are competent, have genuine accomplishments, and are able to persuade undecided voters that conservative ideas are superior. The RNC doesn't need to support more trained seals who can talk a big game to conservative audiences and check all the right boxes, without having the ability to deliver the goods even if they managed to get elected.

I'm with these guys. While the heart of this idea is in the right place, this is a counterproductive idea. We need real results, not just big talk about real results.

There's my two cents.