When it comes to abortion, the Republican platform has been pro-life without exceptions for rape or incest since Ronald Reagan's day. But in 1992, George H.W. Bush announced that contrary to the party platform, he was pro-life with exceptions—a position that was adopted by Bob Dole in 1996, George W. Bush in 2000 and 2004, John McCain in 2008, and for the most part, Mitt Romney in 2012. While the left likes to point out the "extremism" of the pro-life GOP platform, recent Republican presidential candidates have stood with mainstream voters: they were pro-life with exceptions for rape and incest.
John Goodwin of the young Republican group Proximus told Draper, "…we want to be able to show voters that we have a diversity of opinion. Right now, Republicans have such a small number of vocal messengers. What we want to do is add more microphones and eventually drown out the others." We need more microphones for socially tolerant, limited-government conservatives who see Obama's big bureaucratic solutions as harmful to the entrepreneurial, innovative, more-options-not-less Facebook and iPod generation.
There are plenty of voters who are pro-life with exceptions; who find universal background checks completely consistent with the Second Amendment; and who believe that gay Americans deserve the same rights as the rest of us. They want secure borders and a reasonable path to citizenship for immigrants, and a strong safety net in place for future generations. They believe big government and rising debt are threats to economic growth and individual freedom. Those mainstream voters should be Republicans. That's where most Americans are, and that's where the mainstream of the Republican Party should be. Time to bring back the secret sauce.
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