Last night Danny Tarkanian, a candidate for the Republican nomination to take on Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.), held a conference call. Tarkanian offered his well wishes to Reid and his family after yesterday’s car accident left the senator’s wife and daughter seriously injured. He then went on to make the case for why he should be Reid’s Republican challenger.

Actually, the opening argument was made by Erick Erickson of RedState, who argued that nominating candidates like Tarkanian was important to pulling the Republican Party and the country to the right. I asked Tarkanian to identify areas that made him more conservative than his principal primary opponents. While he allowed that there wasn’t much room between him and Sharron Angle, he did identify a few areas he said distinguished him from Sue Lowden.

Tarkanian says that he is to Lowden’s right on taxes, charging her with voting for tax increases as a Nevada state legislator, including the “Nevada jobs tax.” He also said that while she criticizes Reid for not bringing home enough bacon to Nevada, he opposes pork barrel spending. On abortion, Tarkanian says he has always been “staunchly pro-life” while citing newspaper reports saying that Lowden favored taking the pro-life plank out of the Republican platform in 1996. Lowden is running as a pro-life candidate this year, a fact Tarkanian “appalud(s).”

Tarkanian also said that Lowden has changed her mind about Harry Reid. He said that Lowden had donated to Reid in the past and been quoted by Nevada newspapers as saying she had voted for him. Tarkanian says he never believed Reid was good for Nevada. He also committed to supporting the repeal of Obamacare if it is enacted and addressed charges that he was soft on gun control, arguing that he never supported a ban on assault weapons.