The left and the Trotskyitie neocons been giving all sorts of warnings for years about the "dangers" of the Republican party trying to woo the right, and appeal to conservative voters, and have been scoffed at, because that has been a winning, viable strategy for decades. Nixon & Reagan succeeded at that, Bush II ran as a conservative and Bush I ran as the successor to Reagan's conservative image. Note that the former two had 49 state landslides as incumbents, while the Bushes did worse than they should have in their reelection campaigns, once people got a taste of "compassionate" or "kinder, gentler" conservatism. Conservatism wins for Republicans and centrism loses. But maybe this is the real danger - that the leftists knew the reality of the GOP and its politician membership, knew better than the voters that Nixon, Reagan, Bush and the rest had no intention of really adhering to any sort of conservative principles, and were afraid of this day coming. The danger was not that conservatism would kill the party, but that the lie of the GOP's conservatism would be exposed, leading to the current situation, where the voters have simply lost all respect or trust for the party, leaving as the sole remaining contenders for the nomination the two candidates most despised by the rest of the political class.

Your post pretty much proves the point, that the Republican party is not all that conservative. Your counter-example for Obamacare is Bush's tax cuts, which still left people being excessively taxed, they just got some money back. It was not a conservative principle being enacted, it was a lesser degree of a liberal policy. It's like saying a prisoner has been pardoned, when all he really gets is more time in the prison library & the yard.