It took me a long time, but now as the GOP lies in defeat and tries to re-shuffle and re-brand itself, I realize what is it that I like and dislike about the Republican Party.

I like conservative principles and I like conservative people, and these are both to be found within the Republican Party, at least to a greater extent than they are found within the Democratic Party.

I identify with the GOP, but despite this identification I find I have no faith whatsoever in the leadership of the GOP. I feel that there is a vast divide between those voters registered as Republicans and those who are leaders in the Republican Party establishment.

With the seat of President lost, the Chair of the Republican National Committee is the leader of the Republican Party. the RNC. Most Republicans probably don’t know or care, but a new RNC Chair will be elected at the end of January. The contest for Chair is quiet, but it is becoming interesting, and it reflects some of my feelings about Republican leaders. The things I am not seeing are real attempts to move the GOP forward, what I am seeing is factional warfare, incredible disconnect between the voters and the establishment, and facile attempts put a good face on recent defeats.

Particularly onerous is the divide between the RNC and the Republican base. In the blog "RNC Member Tries to Sidestep GOP Activists"

http://townhall.com/blog/g/36430889-fa0e-423d-8d29-b424f0b8c7cd?comments=true#comments

blogger Amanda Carpenter describes efforts by the North Dakota Republican Party Chairman to cancel a debate for RNC candidates organized by Americans for Tax Reform. Of particular interest is a quote from the North Dakota Chairman, "At the end of the day, it doesn’t matter what the public thinks; it matters what 168 of us think."

The "168" are the members of the RNC who will vote for the RNC Chair. Yes, they will make that final decision, but the idea that "it doesn’t matter what the public thinks" is dead wrong.

It matter very much what the public thinks because every single American voter is a member of the public. Americans for Tax Reform are also a sector of the public, as our thousands of other grassroots organizations across our nation. Groups such as these can reach out to the voters and drum up support for the Republican Party. They could do so, if they were so motivated, but why should they be motivated when you see efforts to limit their participation in the Republican Party?

It has been bemoaned that there was little grassroots enthusiasm for the McCain campaign. Why would there be? Do conservative grassroots organizations owe something to the Republican Party that they should put special effort into electing Republicans? Consider that the Republican candidate was John McCain, and that he is one-half of McCain-Feingold, also known as the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act.

The effort to "take the money out of politics" backfired and had the "unintended" effect of stifling the political speech of all sorts of grassroots organizations. Consider this quote of Supreme Court Justice Scalia regarding the case of Wisconsin Right to Life:

There is wondrous irony to be found in both the genesis and the consequences of BCRA. In the fact that the institutions it was designed to muzzle -- unions and nearly all manner of corporations -- for all the "corrosive and distorting effects" of their "immense aggregations of wealth," were utterly impotent to prevent the passage of this legislation that forbids them to criticize candidates (including incumbents). In the fact that the effect of BCRA has been to concentrate more political power in the hands of the country’s wealthiest individuals and their so-called 527 organizations, unregulated by §203. (In the 2004 election cycle, a mere 24 individuals contributed an astounding total of $142 million to 527s. …) And in the fact that while these wealthy individuals dominate political discourse, it is this small, grass-roots organization of Wisconsin Right to Life that is muzzled.

Conservative organizations muzzled by legislation that was sponsored by the candidate they are expected to support, an effort to exclude conservative organizations from the RNC Chair race, conservative voters who are expected to vote Republican, whose campaign contributions are welcomed, voters who are welcome in the crowd at Republican events but not on the stage. Every Republican politician calls themselves a conservative, but most conservative groups have to stay in the background because they are right-wingers that would scare moderate voters. Consider the case of Sarah Palin: a very large percentage of Republicans liked her more than they liked John McCain. This is a fact, but you wouldn’t think it ever happened. When the election was lost McCain aids try to blame the loss on her, ambitious Republicans tried to steal her celebrity at the Republican Governor’s Association, and she has generally been pushed out of the limelight as far as the Republican establishment is concerned.

It this what Republican voters want, that conservative organizations and popular conservative politicians be pushed out of view? No, it is what the RNC wants. My view of the RNC is that of people in suits circling the wagons, one in which they say "big tent" but the inner circle keeps control. Within that circle the different Republican interests bargain with each other to see which brand of Republicanism will prevail and whose candidate will be supported for election.

That is the Republican Party at the national level, what happens down at the county level?

I took a long break from going to meetings of the local county Republican Committee. One reason why is that the night before the Florida Presidential Preference Primary there was a speaker campaigning for John McCain. I feel that the party primaries are supposed to belong to the party voters, and while I expect people to campaign for their candidate I find it unethical for a Republican Party venue to feature a speaker for one Republican candidate unless they will be speakers for the other Republican candidates. Consider that Florida Governor Crist had endorsed McCain, and it starts to look like the state Republican establishment exerting an influence to sway the Republican voters. It could have just been an effort by one moderate Republican to promote another moderate Republican, it could have just been Governor Crist angling to be the vice-presidential pick; it doesn’t matter, it isn’t right. I wonder how many other county Republican meetings featured McCain supporters, and I wonder what else was going on behind the scenes.

The next time I went to a county meeting I had to stand in the hall. There was a legitimate reason for that: it was time to elect a new Republican Executive Committee, so all of the precinct Committee people were in attendance. They all had to be seated first and fire regulations dictated that the room capacity could not exceed 150, so me and another dozen people had to stand out in the hall. There was a legitimate reason I had to stay outside, but it is still a telling analogy: the important Republicans inside, picking the new Republican Party leaders, schnooks like me out in the hall.

Even at the county level, do Republican voters have anything at all to do with the selection of leaders in the local Republican Party? Not really. The REC is elected by the committee people and Republican voters select the committee people for their precinct, but how do the candidates for committee get on the ballot? A committee person told me that they had never wanted to be on the ballot, and had no idea why their name was on it. This leads me to believe that the selections put before the voters were placed on the ballot by the REC itself. In each precinct there were almost as many ballot choices as there were openings, so the majority of those on the ballot were selected for committee positions. I find this to be a very strange arrangements, in which the very important Republicans decide which of the important Republicans will be committee people, a process in which Republican voters are almost a formality. These committee people then elect the REC, and afterwards the REC makes all the decisions. Were is the voter participation in choosing Republican leaders? The voter get to choose 2 or 3 committee people from the 4 or 5 the REC puts before them, and once the REC is elected the committee people that the voters chose are pretty much out of the picture.

The opening passages of the 2008 Republican Party Platform state that it is a party of inclusion. Future GOP plans include outreach to minorities, the youth, and middle income voters. I find such plans to be disingenuous, because right now the party isn’t very inclusive to the people who are already in it.

Travis Christensen

Next time, a commentary on a statement by RNC Chairman Duncan