RNC Race: Radical Reformers vs. The Establishment

This Friday, the Republican National Committee is scheduled to elect a new Chairman.

I've written before about how important this office is, especially considering that the Republicans control neither the White House or the Congress, but I haven't talked much about what the results will say about the direction of the party.

The six men running offer different programs, but they are also offering different viewpoints on the state of the the party and what pieces of it need fixed. And their election would also send different messages to the public.

On one end of the spectrum, you have people like me -- who are pushing for radical reform. Arguably, the most forceful of the candidates representing this position is Ken Blackwell (whom I have endorsed). Blackwell is advocating a radical shifting of power to the individual states -- and has characterized his candidacy as a "shareholder revolt".

However, I would also place Michael Steele and Saul Anuzis in the "reform" camp -- both realize that the party is broken and that rebuilding will require an obsessive devotion to better communication and new technology. But not only are they reformers when it comes to the issues, their very election would symbolize change.

Ultimately, understanding the dynamics of this race means understanding that it is essentially a proxy war between the establishment Bush insiders and radical reform outsiders.


Think of it this way: If you were casting a movie and needed someone to play the RNC chairman, you wouldn't cast Blackwell, Steele or Anuzis in that role (though you might well cast the other candidates). Though Steele and Anuzis have both served as state party chairman, they have an "outsider" feel. Blackwell, of course, is the consummate conservative outsider.

In the other corner, you have incumbent Chairman Mike Duncan -- who seems to spend a lot of time dwelling on the RNC programs that did work (in fairness, he didn't get credit for some successful programs) in the last election -- and seems to think we should just keep plugging away as we have been.

I have no doubt that, should he be re-elected, Duncan would do what he can to tweak the party machinery to make it more effective. However, what we really need to do is to take a jackhammer to the party establishment, tear it down, and rebuild it as a better, stronger organization. If we simply look to reinvent the types of strategies that worked in the Bush years, we will go absolutely nowhere in the fight against the Obama juggernaut.

Winning in the future will require a concerted effort to rapidly ramp-up our online efforts, plus we need to do dramatically better in Northern "blue" or "purple" states like Michigan, Ohio, and Pennsylvania. These are big problems, and fixing them will require the jackhammers and wrecking balls - - not the small chisels being put forward by others.

The problem, of course, is that the 168 people who have votes are RNC members. By definition, an RNC member is an "insider." As such, don't look for the radical reformers to win. It's an inside game, and the insiders usually win those. This, of course, is why real change can take decades...