You draw the Goldwater---->Reagen comparison a lot Micro, but I don't see it. Carter----->Reagen, yeah.
It's not an invention of my insane mind. I recommend two books, one by a liberal - “Before the Storm:Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus” and the other by a conservative - “A Glorious Disaster: Barry Goldwater's Presidential Campaign and the Origins of the Conservative Movement.”
It wasn't just that Goldwater reanimated the conservatives by giving them a new ideology and new leadership – it's that his staff created a network of volunteer activists that was later built upon to promote Conservatism. In essence they've taken the short-term organization of the campaign and its supporting groups and turned them into a long-term relationship.
So, given your analogy, we would (if we had run a kamikazi Paul Rep nomination) have had to wade through Obama, a criminally corrupt Republican, a dumb-as-a-box-of-hammers Republican, and then a monumentally foolish and mendacious Democrat to get to our next Reagan.
For one, I never said it was a 100% Kamikaze process. Some guy with the charisma and face of, say, B. J. Lawson, if somehow propelled to this level of contest, could win.
But the problem is, what IS your alternative? The view many people seem to be taking is that big government is not going away, we must just find guys that will manage it 'conservatively'. This has given America four years of Bush, followed by eight years of Clinton, followed by eight years of Bush, and now followed by Obama. Quite possibly it'll be followed by some McCain clone.
What precisely is your alternative?
Do you have a strategy that doesn't take six decades at best?