Conservatives, Divisive as Ever

Shortly after Ron Paul won the CPAC straw poll, I posted a poll on the small conservative forum I regularly post on.  It was a question as to whether or not you would vote for Ron Paul, if he managed to secure the Republican nomination for President in 2012.  Many conservatives, you see, have trouble with the very notion of Ron Paul winning his Congressional seat, let alone such a high office.
So I posed the following answers to the question “If Ron Paul wins the nomination in 2012 to run as President, would you vote for him?”:

• Yes, I would gladly do so
• Yes, I would begrudgingly pull that lever for him
• Yes, but only if President Obama is still on the Democratic ticket
• No, I’d vote Democrat instead
• No, I’d vote third-party or write-in instead
• Not even in Hell

So the poll went on for awhile.  Eventually, the mods locked the thread because, you see, the Ron Paul-haters really stepped up the hateful rhetoric and many of the more libertarian posters responded in kind.  In any case, the final results were as follows:

• Total people who voted: 28
• Total people who would gladly vote for Ron Paul: 7 (25%)
• Total people who would begrudgingly vote for Ron Paul: 6 (21%)
• Total people who would do so only if Obama was on the Democrat ticket: 5 (18%)
• Total people who would vote Democrat instead: 2 (7%)
• Total people who would vote third party: 2 (7%)
• Total people who said they wouldn't even vote for Ron Paul in Hell: 6 (21%)

When Rush Limbaugh responded to the CPAC straw poll, he merely stated that there must have not been that many conservatives at CPAC for him to have won.  At another point on this same forum, I asked someone if he would rather vote for a pro-choice libertarian or a pro-life Statist.  He responded by stating he’d rather have a Statist running things than a libertarian solely because of that one issue.
Conservatives are not the answer to limited government.  They are merely the other side of the coin when it comes to directing this nation.  I’m afraid our best bet is to convince those few who are open to libertarian ideas that our ideas are better and marginalize the fanatics.