The Republican Establishment seems to believe that conservatives will naturally line up behind a RINO candidate because the alternative – President Hillary, for example – is so awful.  Conservatives understand, however, the real dangers of electing a RINO president.

When a RINO sits in the White House, he can parade around as the “mediator” between conservatives and the left.  RINO presidents can craft “compromises” and claim to be able to “get things done.”  RINOs see themselves as practical men, pragmatists who assume that the left wants government and politics to work.

As a consequence, these RINO presidents appoint to the Supreme Court mushy men like Blackmun, Powell, Stevens, and Souter, whose “judicial qualification” instead of their instinct to engage the left in its war of judicial activism against the Constitution was considered paramount.  George W. Bush showed how tone-deaf he was to the battle for the Supreme Court that he initially nominated Harriet Miers, an ultimate nebbish, before conservative activism forced him to instead nominate Samuel Alito. 

Nixon created a host of federal regulatory agencies that plague us still and that Republicans in Congress were obliged to support, because no Republican leader was questioning that “something” had to be done about the environment, workplace safety, etc. 

RINO presidents often are like the early Union Civil War generals.  George B. McClellan, on paper, looked like a great martial leader.  He was handsome, educated, urbane, and popular.  He graduated second in his class at West Point and was a successful railroad executive before the Civil War.  McClellan was, in fact, a very efficient military bureaucrat, who trained and equipped his troops well, and a basically decent man.

What McClellan lacked, of course, was the will to win and the knowledge that he lived in a time of revolutionary changes.  He was establishment to the core.  It is inconceivable that a President McClellan could have ever issued the Emancipation Proclamation or given the Gettysburg Address or Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address.

In the last fifty years, when Republicans have elected or otherwise placed in the White House (Ford succeeded Nixon) RINOs, the results for conservatives and America have been bad. 

Nixon not only created more domestic nanny state-agencies and bribed state governments with the narcotic of “Revenue Sharing,” but he lost Vietnam by his desperate efforts to be a “peace president.”  Ford snubbed Solzhenitsyn, tried to placate the voracious Soviet Empire, and produced moronic campaigns like “WIN” (Whip Inflation Now) rather than seeking to reduce the governmental causes of inflation.

George H. Bush began his presidency by promising a “kinder, gentler America” and broke his “Read my lips: no new taxes” pledge.  His son campaigned on a similar-sounding slogan, “Compassionate Conservatism,” and then he created a new entitlement to an already impossibly heavy entitlement system.

These sorts of presidents are not so much the “enemy” of the sort of revolutionary conservatism that we so desperately need as they are – or perhaps perceive themselves – neutral arbitrators and competent managers. 

If things were fine, if the founding principles of individual liberty and Judeo-Christian morality permeated the institutions of our nation, then these sorts of innocuous presidents might be okay.  The Founding Fathers, after all, intended government, and especially the federal government, to be small, modest, and tame. 

Today we need much more than honest and competent governance of the vast leviathan of government and institutional leftism.  We need a leader who can fight the rhetorical war against the establishment and who is not concerned about pleasing the left at all.  If we settle for less than that, if we accept a RINO president who will work to compromise with the evil that is leftism and the monster that is Washington, then we will find ourselves not closer to victory, but rather drifting slowly, but definitely, in the direction of  disaster.