A group of conservative Republicans is set to offer a resolution be considered at next month’s Republican National Committee meeting in Hawai’i, calling on party candidates to embrace a majority of a group of ten positions based on core conservative principles to gain and retain RNC endorsements and funding.  I think it’s a brilliant idea that is right for the times.  I acknowledge that there are those who disagree and are concerned that such a resolution may end up bringing about more problems than it will solve.  But I hold that the resolution will help demonstrate to Republican base voters that the party is serious about a return to conservative principles.

Erick spoke for many conservatives in his reasoned and sincere criticism of the pledge resolution.  They are primarily concerned that requiring candidates to take a pledge of this kind will give liberal Republicans cover to proclaim themselves conservative.  They worry the pledge will result in more, not less, fiascoes like the DeDe Scozzafava candidacy in New York’s 23rd congressional district.

But the ten positions are written in a way that is broad enough that any Republican should be able to easily clear the bar of 8 out of 10 that the resolution requires.  Yet, the positions are specific enough to demonstrate both to base voters and disillusioned independents just what Republicanism entails.  And, the positions talk about what we as Republicans stand for, rather than simply what we stand against.

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I typically see eye to eye with RNC Committeeman Jim Bopp, but we are going to have to agree to disagree on a proposed resolution to be debated at the RNC’s Winter meeting. The media is calling it a “purity test” for Republicans. In essence, candidates would be presented with a list of vaguely worded issues and the RNC would be asked to withhold money from any candidate that disagreed with more than two.

Rome long ago stopped selling indulgences, but conservatives keep right on selling them. Look, for example, at NY-23. The moment Dede Scozzafava signed ATR’s no new tax pledge, she was absolved of all her sins, including voting for 198 tax increases in the New York legislature.

Therein lies the inherent problem with candidates signing off on well meaning pablum — there are no teeth and the party will not serve as its own enforcer.

While I applaud the desire of conservative RNC members to try to put the train back on the tracks, I am afraid this will do what the ATR pledge did in Scozzafava’s case — give a lot of candidates cover to pretend to be conservative. People are naturally inclined to short circuit educational processes. People will look at this list to see if a candidate signed off on the issues. If the candidate did, well by God they must be conservative — never mind their voting record or prior statements. After all, only a week before Scozzafava signed the ATR pledge she was bashing Hoffman for having signed it. Never mind though, all was forgiven once Scozzafava signed it too.

Conservatives in the RNC, however well meaning they may be, risk giving liberal candidates easy opportunities to get conservative endorsements simply by checking the box without ever meaning it.

Compare this to the Contract With America in 1994. That document had ten items that were substantive policy positions heavily poll tested and vetted to make sure something like 70% of the American public agreed with each one. Each statement was popular and therefore did not put candidates in awkward positions with voters, as some of the presently suggested issues do. And while there was no enforcement mechanism there either, there did not have to be — every issue was poll tested, mother approved, and voter supported.

Not so with this. And because this, unlike the Contract With America, might affect funding and seals of approval in the primary process, this becomes far more troublesome.

I would encourage the conservative members of the RNC to let conservatives sort out who is and is not a conservative, as opposed to letting any Dede sign up with no intention of ever living up to the pledge. Besides, the Republican Platform specifically says the GOP is opposed to government bailouts of industry, something the GOP, with a Republican President, pushed through Congress in 2008. If the GOP cannot live up to its own platform adopted at a national convention, it sure as heck won’t live up to any pledge put forward by a group of RNC committeemen.

Actions are far more important than words. We should leave it at that.

Folks, there are some serious questions as to the accuracy of the ABC News report linked to in this post showing a Steele quote criical of Palin, Pawlenty, and me.

As a result, I’m yanking the post and digging into it. I’ll see what I can do to sort it out.

Sorry for the inconvenience. This is bothersome. The actual video on which the interview was based does not reflect what was reported. Gail Gitcho from the RNC also say the Chairman was not dinging Palin, Pawlenty, or me.

Contra the empty RNC phone bank room from below, Ben Smith is reporting that the RNC has made 140,000 calls into NY-23 since Sunday for Hoffman.

Good.

UPDATE: On a 4:30 conference call, the Hoffman campaign is downright mocking at the idea the RNC has helped them on the ground.

The attached picture was taken at 8:30 pm last night in the main call center room at the RNC where the volunteers sit for phone banking. There were about 10 people there from 5:30-8. After that? Well . . . you get the point.

Oh, and let’s not forget Harmer, Christie, and McDonnell.

I’m told, by the way, that there are some private rooms with just phones. Certainly, there could have been people in those rooms, but this is where the volunteers were told to go last night. Not a great effort.

If you work for a man, in Heaven’s name work for him. If he pays wages that supply you your bread and butter, work for him, speak well of him, think well of him, and stand by him, and stand by the institution he represents.

Thus begins the Apologia to “A Message to Garcia”. It would behoove Pete Sessions and John Cornyn, head of the NRCC and NRSC respectively, to heed this message. These individuals seem to have forgotten just who pays the bills and funds these committees. And to be clear, that would be THE BASE.

Slip-shod assistance, foolish inattention, dowdy indifference, & half-hearted work seem the rule; and no man succeeds, unless by hook or crook, or threat, he forces or bribes other men to assist him…

Those words were written 110 years ago, yet are wholly applicable to our current situation. The NRSC and NRCC seem to be embracing these things rather than avoiding them.

It is not as if the base hasn’t made their complaints known, ever hear of “Not One Red Cent“. On the contrary, upon hearing the complaints the NRSC has treated them with dowdy indifference to say the least. To the credit of the NRCC they did create the Young Guns program, but as mentioned above “half hearted work seems the rule”.

When will Chairmans’ Sessions and Cornyn remember that character matters…

Well he’s a fine accountant, but if I’d send him up town on an errand, he might accomplish the errand all right, and on the other hand, might stop at four saloons on the way, and when he got to Main Street, would forget what he had been sent for.

Can such a man be entrusted to carry a message to Garcia?

Can we now trust you to run our errands, bypassing the saloons. Or, should we come to expect the continued stench of gin on your breath and failure at the ballot box?

If put to the pinch, an ounce of loyalty is worth a pound of cleverness. If you must vilify, condemn, and eternally disparage, why, resign your position, and when you are outside, damn to your heart’s content.

You have both been to clever for your own good and are quickly outlasting your usefulness.

Remember these words dear Sirs…

In every store and factory there is a constant weeding-out process going on.

[...]

No matter how good times are, this sorting continues, only if times are hard and work is scarce, the sorting is done finer - but out and forever, the incompetent and unworthy go.

[...]

Self-interest prompts every employer to keep the best - those who can carry the message to Garcia.

The process has begun, our collective dander has been raised and we demand answers. Will you step down so that we may make room for our own Rowan?

It is not book-learning young men need, nor instruction about this and that, but a stiffening of the vertebrae which will cause them to be loyal to a trust, to act promptly, concentrate their energies: do the thing - “Carry a message to Garcia!”

Aaron B. Gardner.

The Sunlight Foundation’s Luke Rosiak reported on Friday the Republican National Committee spent $1.4 million on the redesign of GOP.com, a figure which totals more than five times what the RNC’s Democratic counterpart spent to host and maintain Democrats.org. Sources familiar with the RNC’s digital makeover, however, contest Sunlight’s report, calling it “ridiculous.”

Rosiak writes:

The biggest disparity seems to be bandwidth costs–the RNC paid Smartech Corp., a Republican-focused hosting firm, more than a million dollars, plus $22,000 to Eloqua, compared to the DNC’s $203,000 to Sprint, Switch and Data and Servint Corp.–despite the fact that the two sites’ traffic, which determines bandwidth usage and, largely, hosting costs, was the same.

But the design of the site itself was costly, too. In the months prior to the October 13 launch of GOP.com, the committee paid $328,000 to 11 firms for Web development.

For an organization that prides itself on investigative research, the Sunlight Foundation is comically inept at reading campaign finance data. “They should learn to read an FEC report,” remarked my source.

The most outrageous of the RNC’s web-related expenditures, Sunlight’s exposé goes, is the $1 million-plus disbursement to Tennessee-based Smartech Corp. for hosting services. Smartech, considered by many a heavyweight in Republican web hosting, began consulting for the RNC in 2000.

“I can tell you from my tenure there that the Smartech bill includes a lot of things that aren’t GOP.com,” said former RNC eCampaign Director Michael Turk. “If you go back and look at that bill over time, I suspect it has always been high, regardless of who was Chair and regardless of whether they were rolling out a new GOP.com.”

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It’s that time again.  Short version: RNC beat DNC, but DSCC & DCCC significantly outraised their counterparts - sufficiently so that the Democrats raised more overall for the month.  When debt is factored in, the Democrats also went from being significantly behind on cash-on-hand to being slightly ahead.  That being said: the RNC and NRCC are both reporting significant increases in small-person donors.

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The Republican National Committee will unveil a new website early Tuesday morning that promises to increase grassroots participation and offers improved navigability and smarter marketing and fundraising tools for the GOP, according to party officials.

Upon reaching the new GOP.com, RNC Chairman Michael Steele takes a virtual step onto the computer screen and leads users on a tour of the site’s new features.

“Notice anything different?” asks Steele. “It’s the new GOP.com. It’s a forward-looking, open-platform for the party of new ideas. If you’re a Republican activist, this is your space.”

The developers of the new website hope to capitalize on the organic activism that gave way to Tea Parties across the nation by “creating a larger, more informed, more organized, and more energized Republican community.”

Conscious of the propensity for online social networking to mobilize activists, the new website was designed with an unmistakable attentiveness to social media and blogging, having devoted a significant portion of the landing page’s real estate to Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Flickr.

At first glance, the RNC’s new digital threads look nothing like a typical political website. From the dynamic logo featuring user-submitted pictures of supporters to the refreshingly simple navigation menu, the revamped and reorganized GOP web presence represents a commonly-preached but rarely-practiced belief on Capitol Hill: that the best ideas come from outside the Beltway.

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Wouldn’t you know it: I decide not to do anything consequential and the fundraising numbers become available. Short version: the GOP out-raised the Democrats for the first time since April; the NRSC beat out the DSCC for the second month; the NRCC continues to stay essentially tied with the DCCC; and the Democrats aren’t paying their debt down.

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So stop wasting everybody’s time with pretending that you want Republicans for anything but cover and pass your cursed health care rationing bill.

Actually, that’s pretty much what he said:

Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele on Thursday dared Democrats to try a one-party push to overhaul the nation’s health care system.

Steele told reporters that he thinks if Democratic senators think they have the votes, they should try a tactic that would allow them to get around a bill-killing filibuster without the 60 votes usually needed. Steele said he didn’t think Democrats would do it because of potential voter backlash.

“Get it to the floor. Up or down, baby,” Steele said at a news conference at the state GOP headquarters. “Put it on the table. And if you don’t think you’ve got enough votes to get to 60, you’ve got the nuclear option. You’ve got 51.”

(Via Hot Air Headlines)

Democrats who are surprised by this shouldn’t be: this is the natural and inevitable result of the Democratic House leadership deciding to freeze out House Republicans in writing bills this session. That particular bit of hubris then means that we feel that we’re under no obligation to give the Democrats political cover for a blessed thing now - and if the Democrats are feeling upset over that, well, good. They should direct that upset towards the people who actually caused it - which is to say, Pelosi, Hoyer, Murtha, Waxman, Frank, Obey, and every other House leader who let their sense of entitlement and need for petty revenge override their good sense.

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Short version: Democrats had a good month for the DNC - they beat out the RNC for a change - which was enough to let them end with a edge in amount raised and total cash-on-hand of a couple million. Fortunately, July fundraising for the congressional and senatorial committees was not a repeat of June’s: despite their having a significant edge in membership, the DSCC lagged the NRSC and the DCCC barely edged the NRCC. And the debt still remains significant on the Democrats’ side.

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Escalating their attacks on President Barack Obama’s health care overhaul as a dangerous “experiment,” the RNC released a new web video today in which they characterize the President and his White House as, among other things, “in denial” over the economy.

RNC Chairman Michael Steele said, “President Obama has been in office now for 200 days, and the second hundred days of his administration have been worse than the first. The $787 billion stimulus experiment he rushed through Congress still isn’t creating jobs. The job-killing national energy tax he rushed through the House is threatening families and small businesses with higher energy bills.

“And now he wants to rush through Congress a $1.6 trillion government-run health care experiment that will make health care more expensive, add to the deficit and cause tens of millions of Americans to lose their current health insurance and doctors. President Obama has done all of this in just 200 days – and there are still 1,260 days left in his term. America can’t take any more of President Obama’s experiments,” he said.

This morning, the DNC launched a new ad curiously portraying President Obama’s critics as right-wing fringe lunatics, reflexively opposed to the president’s domestic agenda for belief in a citizenship conspiracy. At the close of the offensively absurd web video, a voice over instructed viewers to call the RNC to voice their outrage.

But the RNC was quick to the turn the tables on the Democrats with the particularly well-produced web ad, featuring an aloof Obama playing basketball while figures of the economic downturn race across the screen.

And in a surprising display of savvy, Democratic allies who reached the RNC’s phone lines were instructed to press 1 to voice concern over Republican “mobs,” at which point their call was automatically directed to the DNC’s main switchboard.

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Update: “The RNC is inciting angry mobs to shout out legitimate discussion at public events across the country and now they want to ignore people who deplore their tactics,” said DNC spokesman Brad Woodhouse about the DNC’s failed effort to incite angry mobs to flood the RNC with phone calls.

*       *      *

This is clever:

Republicans played a trick on Democrats today by redirecting angry telephone calls coming into their switchboard to the Democratic National Committee, CNN reports.

Earlier this morning, the DNC released a web video accusing the GOP of inciting mob activity.

“At the end of the video, the DNC instructs people to call the Republican National Committee to express outrage. Callers who dial the RNC’s main number to voice their concern about the DNC’s charges are told to press 1, which sends them to the DNC’s main switchboard.”

The emphasis on that deliciously ironic pair of phrases is mine. In the name of countering what they claim is the GOP’s inexcusable “incit[ement of] mob activity,” the Democrats did what they always do: stir up the masses and, yes, incite mob activity in opposition to the GOP.

Whoever the clever RNC staffer was who thought to redirect those calls right back to the source of the outrage — the DNC — deserves a free lunch and a letter of commendation. That was freaking awesome.

Short version: the Democrats had a good month in their Congressional/Senatorial Committee fundraising (double their previous month’s totals, as well as double their Republican counterparts); the RNC is back to outraising the DNC; cash on hand is at parity, except that the GOP is running with a debt that’s 1/10th of their total and the Democrats are running with one that’s half; and this is all very different than this time in 2007.

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[Updated below]

At last week’s annual conference of the Young Republican National Federation, RNC Chairman Michael Steele joked that he would woo potential black voters with “fried chicken and potato salad,” prompting criticism from some prominent black Republicans that the G.O.P.’s first black chief was undermining outreach to the black community.

Asked how he intends to attract “diverse populations” to a party bereft of minority coalitions, Steele replied, “My plan is to say ‘Y’all come,’ because a lot of you are already here.”

But noting that an overwhelming 95% of black voters nationwide supported Obama in last year’s general election, black Republican strategists caution that simply saying “y’all come” won’t cut it. Ali Akbar, a young Georgia Republican and online consultant, warns there is something more fundamental to courting minority voters than merely rolling out the welcome mat.

“We have issues of tone, recognition of economic and social circumstances, and to be frank, we’re not talking about how our policy initiatives directly benefit the African American community.”

Indeed, we’re talking about fried chicken.

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Yup, it’s that time again.  Short version: the DNC beat the RNC last month, thanks to a Presidential fundraiser; but the NRSC actually raised more money last month than the DSCC; and the DCCC raised only about 200K more than the NRCC.  While the cash-on-hand edge for the GOP is less than it was last month’s, it’s because the Democrats are still not retiring their debt, which is 4x the GOP’s.

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When Democrats gained a firm lock on all the power in Washington, one thing that seemed sure to follow was a huge edge in fundraising. After all, Barack Obama is a one-man money machine, and Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi would surely be able to raise tons of cash from industries worried how Congress might treat them. Instead, their fundraising has been lackluster - and Barack Obama doesn’t seem to be helping:

Thursday night’s joint Democratic fundraiser headlined by President Barack Obama is expected to bring in a total of $3 million for the two Democratic campaign committees, according to a party strategist familiar with the event.

The figure is surprisingly low considering Obama’s vaunted fundraising ability during the 2008 presidential campaign and the fact that this is the first joint fundraiser benefiting Congressional Democrats since the party regained control of the White House. It’s also about $11.5 million less than what GOP officials said they raised last week for the National Republican Congressional Committee and National Republican Senatorial Committee at a dinner featuring former Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.)…

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Short version: the DNC kept quiet about its fundraising for a reason; the NRSC & DSCC remain tied in their ability to bring in cash; the DCCC is underperforming; and that debt problem is still looming for the Democrats.

Comparison to last month:

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Republican National Committee members today will vote on a resolution to rebrand the Democratic Party the “Democrat Socialist Party,” upon the urging of leading conservative members of the committee.

In an email to committee members announcing the resolution, conservative stalwart James Bopp, Jr., said President Obama’s foremost intention is to reengineer the American way of life, and will stop at nothing short of restructuring our society “along socialist ideals.”

Bopp hopes their misguided efforts to rebrand the Democratic Party will serve as a galvanizing point in American politics, not unlike “President Reagan’s identification of the Soviet Union as the ‘evil empire’ galvanized opposition to communism.”

Not quite.

Unlike the “Evil Empire,” Republicans lost to the Democratic Party in a fair and free election – the hallmark of American democracy – to the tune of 9,500,000 votes. And then, of course, is the fact that we’re not, say, at war and with mutually-assured destruction looming overhead.

The Democratic Party may well be, as Bopp contends, on a slow, steady march towards Socialism, but passing such a resolution would be a four-minute mile run towards generational oblivion.

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