I finally watched the RNC candidate debate at:

http://www.c-span.org/Watch/watch.aspx?MediaId=HP-A-13924

Based on the debate alone, I think that Ken Blackwell might be the best pick.

The reason I say this is because Blackwell stands out. Each of those six candidates are qualified and at some point each of them said something I heartily agreed with. The problem is that 5 of them sounded like politicians that in many ways were just carbon copies of each other. In terms of presenting a leadership face to Republicans and all other Americans I think people will listen to Blackwell rather than writing him off as just another suit. Watch the debate, you’ll see what I mean.

Blackwell said a couple of things I think make him really stand out from his competition. I quoting from memory, so I might be a little off.

"I think that Bush spending opened the door to Obama’s big government."

I could not agree more, and I think Republicans are going to have to divorce themselves from Bush fiscal practices, not just to remain true to their principles, but also to clearly differentiate themselves from the democratic party.

"There is not one vote in one precinct that we shouldn’t be going after. Reagan was fond of saying that "status quo" is Latin for "the big mess we are in," and we are in a big mess."

I like Republicans who admit that we are completely messed up. There’s been too much sugar-coating

"The RNC can’t be a social club, it needs to be the premier Republican organization in America."

"We have got to stop saying one thing and then doing something else. Authenticity."

I’m a big fan of authenticity.

I’m going to have to take a good look at Blackwell.

The question is "what does it matter what I think, what does it matter what anyone thinks outside of the voting members of the RNC?"

That’s a hard question to answer. This is like many issues in life where you have no direct power but you can at least offer your opinion. The only thing that grassroots Republicans can do to have their voice heard is to phone, write, or e-mail RNC members and voice their opinion. There are three RNC members in each state, these being the state GOP Chairman and the RNC Committeeman and Committeewoman. They are most easily contacted through the website of the state GOP headquarters.

To the credit of all the RNC candidates, they seem in agreement that the party has a responsibility to oppose Republican candidates and legislation that go against Republican principles. That’s a new one to me, I’ll have to wait and see before I believe that.

Michael Steele

Michael Steele is a contender for the RNC Chair. He has an extremely impressive resume and he is saying all the right things.

First, the resume. Steele is a lawyer in private life, specializing in business law. A former chairman of the Maryland Republican Party, Steele became Lt. Governor of Maryland in 2002. He made an unsuccessful run for US Senate in 2006, and in 2007 became the chairman of GOPAC. Other political activities include being a co-chair for the Republican Leadership Committee, and a senior advisor to GROWpac and a member of the RNC. He is also on the Administrative Board of the Maryland Catholic Conference.

When you look at Steele’s resume it is clear that he is definitely worthy of consideration for RNC chair. Business and law make up a large part of politics, he has the experience. He has the party experience, and he has worked with Republican PACS and been on the RNC, so he definitely has experience as far as promoting the Republican Party. He was a Lt. Governor and though he failed to gain a Senate seat he still had the experience of running, so he knows what goes into campaigning and governing.

All together you would say that Steele would be a good pick for RNC Chair. However, there is something that bother’s me about this guy.

I get the feeling that Steele is more about image than he is about substance. Don’t get me wrong, Steele obviously brings a great deal to the table, but I feel that in regards to his bid for RNC Chair Steele has crafted the image he thinks will gain him victory.

Why do I feel this way?

1)Steele’s GOPAC bio doesn’t mention his failed Senate campaign. Running for Senate is a big deal and something I feel is worthy of mention in a biography. I speculate that Steele thinks this defeat would be perceived as a negative, so he isn’t talking about it.

2)Steele’s bio fails to mention that he was a co-chair to the Republican Leadership Committee. The RLC is a PAC that promotes moderate Republicans. My belief is that Steele thinks his affiliation with the RLC would be perceived as a negative by conservatives, so he isn’t talking about it. I think this is a shame. Ideological conflicts between moderate and conservative Republicans need to be addressed for the overall good of the Republican Party.

3)In his bio on the GOPAC website, Steele is described as "An expert on political strategy, fund-raising, PACs, and election reform." While Steele might be considered an "expert" in that he is experienced, I’m not sure that in his PAC work he has really been exceptionally effective.

4)GROWPAC does not seem to exist anymore. I can’t find much information about this PAC, but it seems to have come into existence in 1998 and was originally called the "American Renewal Pac FKA-Black Congressional Fund. According to opensecrets.org it distributed $34,750 for House Republicans and $3000 for Senate Republicans in 2002, but by 2004 the organization had virtually no income or expenditures, and nothing at all by 2006. It’s receipts in 1998 were $320,000, in 2000 were $1, 037, 710, in 2002 were $847, 083, and 2004 were a measly $74.

I am going to assume that the purpose of this PAC was to support African American Republicans for Congress, that has not been a very successful effort. That this PAC no longer seems active also attests that while this PAC did very well for a while it was ultimately abandoned as unsuccessful.

I consider it to be a shame that GROWPAC failed. Steele is African-American, and I get the feeling that many people think that putting an African-American as head of the RNC would be a good move towards the GOP gaining more of the Black vote. They might be right. However, I think a better effort to win Black voters would be for their to be more Black Republican candidates overall, and making that happen seems to have been GROWPACs purpose. Putting one African-American in a high position would be seen as a token appointment, and I sincerely hope that people aren’t just supporting Steele because of his race. One appointment would be considered as token, but many Black candidates would be seen as the legitimate effort that it would be. The problem is that the RNC can’t support Black candidates over White candidates any more than it could get away with supporting White over Black. GROWPAC or something like it needs to be revived.

5)What exactly is GOPAC?

To be the Chairman of GOPAC sounds very prestigious, but that would depend upon what GOPAC is and what they do. Being in charge of GOPAC is only a big deal if GOPAC is a big deal.

Some raw information and opinion:

According to a wikipedia article, Steele said that regarding GOPAC, "it will soon be back as the powerful force it once was under Newt Gingrich."

GOPAC commissioned a post-election study from The Tarrance Group, a political consulting firm. The Tarrance Group also mentions GOPAC on the home page of their website.

Many of the Tarrance Group winning candidates were also endorsed candidates of the moderate Republican PAC, the Republican Leadership Committee.

Steele seems to be working with Gov. Tim Pawlenty. At the Republican Governors Association, Pawlenty made an effort to steal the spotlight from Gov. Palin, presumably to promote himself for a bid for the Republican nomination for President in 2012.

In a Nov. 7, 2008 piece by Jonathan Martin in the Politico, "GOPAC plans look back, look ahead," mentions that GOPAC commissioned the Tarrance Group to survey voters views of the GOP and release the findings to the media. The piece also mentions that the Tarrance Group worked for the campaigns of Rudy Giuliani and John McCain.

In a Dec. 11, 2008 piece by Karl Rove in the Wall Street Journal, "How the GOP should prepare for a comeback," says regarding GOPAC, "It needs to be revitalized, or it’s original mission taken up by a fresh group." It’s a pretty inciteful piece, I include the link: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122895587373896541.html?mod=todays_us_opinion

According to opensecrets.org, in 2008 GOPAC America had $151,375 in receipts and $126,678 in expenditures. I find these expenditures quite intriguing they are in part:

INFOCISION MANAGEMENT CORPORATION $40,696 These were for fundraising

phone calls. I don’t know what exactly they were raising funds for, but considering that this was GOPAC’s largest expense, I hope they took in more than they spent.

COMPLIANCE CONSULTING COMPANY OF VA LLC $11,231 This was for political consulting. The question is raised, if Steele is an expert, why the need for political consultants?

Not counting Steele, McCain, or Coleman, this is a record of 5 wins and 6 losses. That is nothing to brag about, and certainly nothing to base a campaign for RNC Chair. Also consider that in political terms the $151,375 is chicken feed, especially when it is spread out to different campaigns.

The very odd thing is that GOPAC isn’t supposed to focus on federal campaigns, it is supposed to focus on state and local campaigns, and on training Republican leaders. Looking at the GOPAC website, I’m not so sure that these efforts are going very well.

As far as candidates I see two candidates under "candidate spotlight," and 29 under "past candidate spotlight." I don’t care about past candidates, and 2 current candidates aren’t very many. As far as education, I don’t see anything the website that a candidate couldn’t get from their local Republican Party.

The data suggests some questions.

1)Steele and GOPAC have a great deal of interaction with political consultants, the experts who are paid to tell politicians what they should do to win votes. What if the "experts" are promoting Steele because he is the person they want rather than the right person for the job. Considering that the Tarrance Group also worked for McCain and Giuliani, can their expert opinion be considered to have much merit? Aside from GOPAC, the Tarrance Group has a very large number of Republican clients. How much influence do consultants have over the Republican Party as a whole, and considering that consulting is a business, can this influence be purchased?

2)Considering that Steele and Pawlenty seem to be in cahoots, and that Pawlenty seems to be a rival for Sarah Palin’s spotlight, and that the Tarrance Group seems to have many moderate Republican clients, it there an organized effort to exclude social/religious conservatives from influence in the Republican Party?

Now some speculation.

I think that GOPAC wasn’t a big deal before Steele took it over, and I don’t think it’s a big deal now.

I think that Steele took the Chairmanship of GOPAC primarily for self-promotion. It was once run by Newt Gingrich, that is a good name to be associated with.

I think that a lot of people know that GOPAC is no big deal, but they are giving Steele a pass and not objecting when he is continually referred to as the "Chairman of GOPAC."

I think that Steele has been getting so much exposure because he is the insider party pick to be RNC Chair. I think the decision has already been made and all we are waiting on is for the vote to make it official. I don’t know who made the decision, or why, or how they will be able to transform their desire into reality, but I feel like it’s coming.

I could be wrong. We’ll have to wait and see. Even if GOPAC is a minor PAC and Steele is being promoted by insiders, that does not mean that he wouldn’t be as good a Chairman as anyone else. The problem is that we just don’t know, and outside the 168 members of the RNC, Republican voters have no say in the process.

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