Michael P. Farris -president and founder, Home School Legal Defense Association; attorney, specializing in constitutional law; former Republican candidate for Lt. Governor of Virginia (1993); author; frequent public speaker; appeared on ABC Nightline, CNN Inside Politics, and others.

 I lost the election, so I feel about four percent under qualified to make this presentation. But I am proud of what we did in terms of energizing thousands of new conservative activists in Virginia and across the country.

I've had calls from all kinds of people who were encouraged by my campaign who want to run for city council and state legislature, even for Congress here and there. Some of them have pipe-dreams when they call. But many of them are very realistic candidates and can really make a difference.

I would like to begin with a couple of pieces of lighter advice, things I learned in the course of the campaign. They're probably good pieces of advice for all of us, whether we ever run for office or not.

The first is, never refuse a breath mint. I learned that well during the campaign.

Another is, be ready to give answers to questions you never anticipated.

One of the earliest questions I was asked in the campaign was my position on chicken fighting.

The only thing I could think of was from when I was in grade school back in the early '50s. Chicken fighting was when you put one guy on your back and you went around and tried to knock each other down. That's what I thought chicken fighting was.

But I found out it was real chickens. So I did formulate a position on chicken fighting. Just for the record, it is ten-ounce gloves, seven-round maximum, and Colonel Sanders is prohibited from betting on the outcome.

I want to give you points of substantive advice. I've tried to pick out things that are not obvious, not pieces of advice all candidates who've run for office might give. Here are seven things I learned in my campaign.

My first point: Be a happy conservative, not a scary conservative.

One of the fundamental differences between Barry Goldwater in 1964, when I headed Eighth Graders for Goldwater, and Ronald Reagan in 1980 was that the public perceived Barry Goldwater as a scary conservative.

The American public believed that Ronald Reagan was a nice guy. And of course, that's the truth. But the ability to translate the truth into public perception is part of the art of politics.

It's extraordinarily important for people to understand who we are and what we believe. We don't have to come across as people who are scary.

If I were going to give advice to liberals, I would say they need to appear to be sober. People don't like a happy liberal--that scares 'em to death.

Conservatives need to be happy, nice people. My own congressman, Frank Wolf, said that a lot of people make a decision in an election on the basis of who they would like to have in their backyard for a barbecue. If you present that kind of personality, then you have a good chance. Of course, being a fraud in that respect simply will never work.

I am convinced, after shaking tens of thousands of hands in the last year and talking to countless people, that people generally are willing to elect the conservative over a liberal or over a moderate, provided two things. First, that the person is qualified. And, second, that the conservative is not scary.

What I plan to do should I run again is to have lots of early advertisements showing myself and my family. I've got a bunch of cute kids. I should show ads with me out being a softball coach and then lots of me talking to people. In the past campaign, I won about 70 percent of the vote of people who actually heard me talk. If people feel they know me, it will be an inoculation against a lot of "He's a scary conservative" charges in the future.

My second point: If you're running as a Republican conservative, expect to be attacked within the Republican party by some significant people.

John Warner attacked me. He's at it again, this time against Oliver North. To some degree, in some cases, you can neutralize this problem by gilding personal relationships with such people whenever possible. I possibly could have neutralized John Warner. I don't think it's possible for John Warner to be neutralized completely regarding conservatives, but that might have been possible in my case.

Probably more important, when you're in a situation like I was in, where you're running as part of a whole Republican ticket, your dedicated people can win enormous good will for the cause of conservatism by being the best foot soldiers for the whole ticket across the whole state. The credibility conservatives gain by being faithful foot soldiers for everyone creates an enormous good will.

The third principle comes from an experience right after I won the nomination.

Virginia has a unique way of nominating candidates. We hold conventions which are essentially like a national convention for nominating a presidential candidate. People come from all the city units and county units across Virginia to the state convention. I was nominated by the largest political convention in the history of the world.

I had the smallest budget of any of the seven statewide candidates, and I won the largest convention vote of any of the seven statewide candidates.

One potential candidate for office in the future came up to me afterwards and said, "How'd you do that?" And my answer was, "I stood for something."

That's the absolute truth. So, stand up for something. I am convinced that people are not looking for someone who will have the right moderation on issues. People are looking for qualified people who have the guts to stand up and say what they believe and mean what they say and not back down on it.

It's important as well that the issues you take on are issues of substance.

We must paint the picture of what we want government to be like. We want less government. We must get to the ultimate issues of how we're going to reduce government and what that will mean to people's lives.

It's fine to campaign on things like term limits and election reform and various kinds of reform agendas, but we must translate that ultimately into issues of substance to really capture the imagination of people.

The fourth piece of advice, and this is especially true for those of us who are born again Christians, is for us to learn to argue our case from the Constitution of the United States.

Being a constitutional lawyer, that's an easy thing for me to do. It's natural. But I am convinced you cannot appeal to the cross-section of American public on any principle of higher law other than the Constitution of the United States. The American public overwhelmingly has high respect and reverence for the Constitution of the United States.

So when I was asked my position on abortion, for example--I am 100 percent pro-life, and, yes, I do take the position of no abortions in the case of rape or incest--but when they asked me about that, I argued my position from the Constitution.

Frankly, that's how I got to my own opinion on the issue. The Baptist Church I grew up in never taught us about abortion back in the '50s, '60s, and early '70s. We simply were untaught on those issues at that period of development of the evangelical church in this country.

I simply pointed out that I believe that the 14th Amendment, where it says "no person shall be denied the rights of life, liberty or property without due process of law," begins at the moment of conception and goes to natural death.

 I was asked, "Well, why do you think that's what they meant by 'person'?" I pointed out to the Declaration of Independence, because the Declaration of Independence is the equivalent of our Articles of Incorporation. That's what created the United States of America, and that really is the founding document of our country.

The Declaration points out that we are "endowed by our Creator with certain unalienable rights; among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." So when are we endowed with the right to life? We're endowed with the right to life by the terms of the Declaration of Independence at the moment of creation. When else can the Creator do it?

With that kind of argument, the press never had a comeback. They didn't know how to argue with me.

They thought I was going to say, "Well, Psalm 37 says. . ."

It's important for us to learn to present our case on a number of issues based on the Constitution of the United States. If we can do that, it really helps our appeal to a broad section of people, to draw them into our beliefs.

The fifth point of advice I would give to conservative candidates is: Run to win, not to make a point.

If I want to make a point, I'll go write another book. Or write a letter to the editor, get on a talk show, start a talk show.

Lots of ways to make points are more cost effective and a more productive investment of people's lives and money than running a political campaign.

It is usually wrong for you or any candidate to take money from people and take time from people if you don't have an expectation, a plan to win.

I'm sure many of you get these kinds of calls. I get them now. A guy wants to run for Congress from a Western state. I ask him what his background is. It turns out that he drives a sleigh in the wintertime. He takes about 5,000 people a year out on his sleigh. He thinks that because he's talked to people in his sleigh that they'll vote for him in Congress.

A number of people believe that, just because they have conservative views, they're qualified to run for office. We need to get out to our grass roots what the real qualifications are to be able to run seriously for office.

The sixth point that I would make is to raise your money early. My television ads illustrated the problem. If I had been able to put on, with the degree of saturation that we needed two weeks earlier, the ad Bill Bennett did for me, the outcome of the election would likely have been different.

The Washington Post, the Richmond Times-Dispatch, the Wall Street Journal, paper after paper, editorially came to my defense the last two weeks. But the vast majority of people never read an editorial page. It just simply was too little too late.

One of the things I'm going to be doing is start a group called the Madison Project. I went to attorney Alan Dye and said, "Alan, political parties don't pay taxes. There's got to be some way to have an organization that doesn't pay taxes yet it could be as partisan as it wants and give money to candidates." Alan and I have done the work to start a Section 527 organization. It's brand new in your lexicon of sections out of the I.R.S. Code.

And we can lobby on issues. Alan just cautions me, "When you lobby on issues, be sure to be partisan about it." Boy, that really breaks my heart.

We're going to get money to candidates early--lots of money.

My goal is within two cycles to be able to give a candidate running for Congress fifty to a hundred thousand dollars of early money. Basically what we're doing is a conservative version of EMILY's list.

And we are not targeting just people who can give larger sums in federal races but those who can give less than the maximums.

My seventh piece of advice is that it's better to be disappointed than ashamed.

My opponent, I feel, got a lot of criticism for religious bigotry. In fact, the Richmond Times-Dispatch has named an award after him; they call it the Don Beyer Award for Religious Intolerance. They gave it to a Time magazine reporter for bashing the Catholic Church.

My opponent has a lot to be ashamed of. I've got a lot to be disappointed about. If you could give me a choice, I'd rather be disappointed.

There are many ways conservatives can make themselves ashamed.

One is to compromise our stand on principles to try to win an election.

Another is to compromise our loyalty to God and try to soft play our relationship to God. I never did that. I know for absolutely certain two people who prayed to received Jesus Christ as their Savior as a result of interaction with our campaign. One was a campaign worker whose fiancee broke up with him. I walked out, spent 20 minutes in a parking lot with him, and he prayed to receive Christ.

We never hid light under a basket at any point in the campaign, although I didn't go out and do thing like tell reporters, "God told me to run."

But one reporter kept pressing me and pressing me and pressing me on this and trying to get me to say "God told me to run," and I wasn't about to say it. Finally I said, "Okay, you got me. I finally give up. One night about 2 o'clock in the morning I woke up. I couldn't sleep, and I needed something to eat. So I went down and on my refrigerator there was a reflection. The reflection of Elvis was on my refrigerator.

"And Elvis told me that God told him to tell me that if I ran for Lieutenant Governor of Virginia, we would stop world wars forever and bring peace and cure cancer. Now, you satisfied?"

I tried to make the example as ridiculous as possible because I thought otherwise he would believe it.

We don't need to compromise our loyalty to God. But we shouldn't run in a way that is offensive to others by talking God talk before people who don't understand God talk.

Another way you can become ashamed rather than disappointed is to compromise integrity by shading the truth about yourself or about your opponent or even little details that happen in the course of a campaign.

There is such a temptation to tell people what they want to hear. I understand that temptation very fully. And it doesn't matter what that little detail is. I think that God will hold us to a higher standard and will not let us get away with that kind of action.

We just have to be people of the highest level of integrity. If we do that, I think that we'll walk away unashamed. We may not walk away the victors, but I'd rather be able to hold my head high before the ultimate Judge than before the electorate.