I don't see anything wrong with this; having a baseline by which to define a party's principles seems to me like a pretty logical thing to do. What shared goals can any political party hope to achieve, if there is not some consensus as to what those goals are? I see maybe one item on this list I would oppose, and a couple I would be lukewarm in supporting, but the rest look very solid to me, which would still place me above the proposed 7/10 mark.
The problem you run into is when you have candidates who share very few, if any, of the shared goals that a party is supposedly promoting. The recent fiasco in NY 23 with Scozzawhatshername comes to mind as a prime example. She runs as a Repub on a platform devoid of all conservatism, then drops out and supports the Democrat.
This has come up in previous threads and has been shown to be wrong. In fact Scozzafava's experience should exactly show why going further to the right is a recipe for disaster for Republicans in the long term. Scozzafava was a moderate Republican, she was for lowering taxes, for cutting welfare spending, etc... etc... etc. In fact as far as New York state goes, she was a conservative Republican. Analysis of her position here:
http://www.themonkeycage.org/2009/10/scozzafava_is_a_conservative_r.html The reason why she endorsed Owens was that Hoffman was so far off the deep end to the right that she ended up being closer in ideology to the moderate Democrat than the extreme right wing candidate. The loss of NY-23 is entirely the fault of the extreme right wing that tried to put up a candidate that was too conservative even for a conservative district.
Parties frequently go through some soul searching when they are confronted with losses as catastrophic as 2006 and 2008 were. Republicans for the moment have decided that they will go even farther to the right and purge the nonbelievers. If they continue with this trend I would bet a lot of money they will lose in 2012, and lose big.
They will pick up seats in 2010 regardless, as the party out of power nearly always does and I imagine the base will take entirely the wrong lesson from this. They will think that the cyclical gain of congressional seats that every party out of the White House enjoys will be some sort of vindication of conservative extremism. We'll see all sorts of crowing about how they just needed to get back to conservative ideals, etc... etc. Then 2012 will come around, and if they run a far right candidate they will get slaughtered by Obama... again.
You read it here first.
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