An old chestnut...

We've been over this before... your examples are flawed.

I know the argument... the further "right" the candidate, the better he contrast to sitting "libs" like Carter, Johnson or Clinton.  I simply don't think it is true.

Carter "won" in 1976 because of the disaster that was the final term of the Nixon/Ford Administrations.  V.I. Lenin could have run for the Democrats that year and beat anyone associated with the existing GOP leadership.  So Ford's losing can't be attributed to his lack of "conservative" appeal at all.

Bush Sr. lost, not because Clinton was more appealing to "moderates" or "middle-of-the-road" voters... but because the conservative vote was split between Bush (winning almost 70% of the vote) and Perot (who won 30%).  Bush runs sans Perot, and Bush wins by a landslide.

If your argument was accurate, then Kerry should have been a much closer loser than he was in 2004, right?  How does it explain the close vote associated with the now infamous 2000 election cycle?

More importantly, why isn't Ron Paul more of a factor?  How much more of a contrast could you hope for than Obama/Paul?  No candidate in the last 100 years has done a better job of sticking to his guns than Paul has... yet he is little more than a foot note each election year.

Reagan won by such a huge margin in 1980 because he ran on the premise that he could "fix" what was wrong and he gave the voters specifics about how he would do it.  He was a stark contrast (and a breath of fresh air, frankly) when compared to Carter and his "malaise" speech... but he wasn't radically different than the other four GOP candidates that ran in the primaries (which included Bush Sr. and Bob Dole... both seen as stark "conservatives" at the time).  The rest of the GOP class of 1980 mocked Reagan for his "voodoo economic" theories... and that is a fact.

Again... we aren't going to see this repeat.  Reagan was working to make the top marginal tax rate come down from 70% to 50%, and in the last two years of his eight in office, all the way down to 28%.  Even now, we are only at a top marginal rate of 35%... too much, but nothing compared to the reduction that Reagan gave the country.  No President can possibly hope to repeat THAT level of success in delivering on a promise of "lower taxes"... not even in this "Age of Obama".