If conservatives could find anyone with this skill set, he’d switch parties. Conservatives just don’t think like that. They start with the ideology and work backwards.
A conservative economist simply lacks the intellectual flexibility to think out of lockstep. It’s a mindset. (Not to mention that the very first time he or she opposed an ideological point on intellectual grounds, they’d promptly lose all credibility with conservatives. See: “If it doesn’t fit on a bumper sticker, it can’t be true.”)
But then, the conservative who wrote this wouldn’t understand — for the same reasons.
I think couching this problem in the context of “conservatives” and “liberals” is an error of semantics. The right wing authoritarian mind is distinctive and readily identifiable. Additionally, there are authoritarian leaders and authoritarian followers, both also easily distinguishable from each other. Corrupt is not only a conservative trait or a liberal trait as it is a condition that afflicts all of our politicians to some degree, both in washington and those aspiring to washingtonian largesse.
Read about the authoritarian mind: http://home.cc.umanitoba.ca/~altemey/