For Cheney, these issues are unimportant. In that context, the objections to Cheney have weight. The problem for the disgruntled Republicans is that they have nowhere to go. They know the Democrats won't be better on these issues and may be worse on others. For former presidential candidate Gary Bauer, who is now supporting Bush, this means lots of fighting ahead.
Big money is a corrupting force in the party.
I don't know how it became a conservative principal that that was okay. But defending soft money has, in fact, almost become a point of faith in some circles of the Republican Party. At a Christian Coalition of America rally Tuesday, Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky vowed before a massive crowd to do everything in his power to protect soft money. The most disconcerting things about the Republican convention as of Tuesday night were the appropriation of patriotism for political purposes and the invocation of President Bush's role in Iraq as a selling point for a new Bush administration. In the years since 1991, Bush's failure to deal adequately with Saddam Hussein has become painfully evident.