Conservatives have a ready explanation whenever the GOP loses an
election: The Republican candidate was too liberal.

You heard this again and again after Mitt Romney’s loss to
Barack Obama. “When conservative principles are the focal point of
the election, they win,” wrote Michael Walsh in National Review.
“When ‘electability’ and ‘reaching across the aisle’ are
personified in a middling candidate at the presidential level, they
lose.” The trouble with Romney, Walsh continued, was that he
“spectacularly refused to engage the Democrats on an ideological
level.”

Red State’s Erick Erickson seconded that motion: “Romney barely
took on Barack Obama,” he wrote as the electoral dust settled. “He
drew few lines in the sand, made those fungible, and did not stand
on many principles.” A few days later, he repeated the message:
“Mitt Romney tried to blur lines with Barack Obama. He did not
defend social conservatism. …”

Chris Chocola, president of the Club For Growth, concurred: “The
(Republican) party is rarely in a position to determine the best
candidate. When you have someone who can articulate a clear,
convincing, conservative message,” he wrote, “they win.”

“We wanted someone who would fight for us,” complained Jenny
Beth Martin of Tea Party Patriots. “What we got was a weak moderate
candidate, hand-picked by the Beltway elites and country-club
establishment wing of the Republican Party. The presidential loss
is unequivocally on them.” Martin delivered that judgment at a D.C.
news conference where she was joined by other conservative
luminaries such as direct-mail maestro Richard Viguerie and
Marjorie Dannenfelser, president of Susan B. Anthony List, an
anti-abortion group.

Thirty-four days from today, the Old Dominion will provide a
real-world test of that theory. When Virginians go to the polls,
they will have the opportunity to vote for the most conservative
slate of statewide candidates in modern times.
Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli — for whom “tea party favorite” has
become an all but official agnomen — outmaneuvered the Virginia GOP
establishment to seize the gubernatorial nomination from the more
moderate, less confrontational Bill Bolling. Bolling has since
announced the creation of the Virginia Mainstream Project “to call
our party back to a more mainstream approach.”

Cuccinelli’s conservatism is unadulterated: He fought the EPA
over climate change and filed the first state suit against
Obamacare. He opposes abortion even in cases of rape and incest;
considers homosexuality “intrinsically wrong”; supports school
choice, gun rights, and tax cuts; and takes a hard-line stance on
illegal immigration. Three years ago, he even handed out lapel pins
to his staff bearing a more demure version of the state seal — one
that covered up the otherwise exposed breast of the Roman goddess
Virtus. (Racy stuff, if you squint really hard.)

State Sen. Mark Obenshain, running for Attorney General, is less
pugnacious but no less conservative than Cuccinelli. He has
supported both fetal “personhood” legislation and requiring an
ultrasound as a precondition of abortion; favors requiring a photo
ID to vote; wants to drug-test welfare recipients; has a 100
percent rating from the American Conservative Union; and once
introduced legislation permitting state regulators to yank the
license of any business employing an illegal alien.

And then there is E.W. Jackson, the nominee for lieutenant
governor, whose pronouncements on social issues go too far even for
his running mates. An August Times-Dispatch profile summarized some
of them, noting that Jackson has “linked homosexuality to
pedophilia, called gays and lesbians ‘sick’ and ‘perverted,’
ridiculed President Barack Obama’s Christian faith and accused the
Democratic Party of being ‘anti-God’. … Jackson (also has) said
… ‘the Democrat Party and Planned Parenthood are partners in this
genocide’” — i.e., the aborting of black children. Sunday before
last, he suggested people of non-Christian faiths practice a “false
religion.”

Talk about drawing lines in the sand. These are not milquetoast
conservatives, hand-picked by country-club RINOs. These are
red-meat conservatives of crystalline purity and adamantine resolve
— picked at a tea party-heavy convention attended by 13,000 of “the
most strident voices in” the GOP, as a Bolling spokeman put it back
in May.

After years of enduring candidates too moderate for their
tastes, fire-and-brimstone conservatives have the ticket they
always dreamed of — precisely the sort of Republican ticket, they
insist, that wins elections. It is also precisely the sort of
Republican ticket dreamed of by Democrats — who, believing the GOP
slate is far too extreme for any rational voter to support, have
made its conservative principles the focal point of the
election.

In 34 days, we’ll find out whose theory is right.

This article
originally appeared at the Richmond Times-Dispatch.