Republicans Seek to Fix Short-Sitedness

"You earned the beating you took yesterday. You earned every bit of it. It is your fault." Henke wrote. "Democrats may or may not have deserved to win, but you deserved to lose."

You can almost hear him grinding his teeth as he typed: "Some of you will say 'Republicans need to fight/hold Democrats accountable,' as if it is sufficient to be against Democrats. The pendulum may eventually swing back to you, but you won't know what to do with it."

For many, blogging is more a voyeuristic exercise than an expressive one. They read postings and rarely, if ever, comment. Henke's posting, however, drew 145 comments. A week later, Bob Vander Plaats, the former Iowa gubernatorial candidate who chaired Huckabee's successful operation there, also caused a stir.

"Jesus Christ, whom many Republicans claim to follow, summoned his followers to be either hot or cold toward Him, because a 'lukewarm' commitment makes Him want to vomit. I believe this accurately reflects the mood of voters in the past several elections where Republicans have witnessed consecutive defeats," Vander Plaats wrote. "We have followed the misguided advice of 'experts' to abandon our principles and move to the middle so we can supposedly win. In essence, we have become 'lukewarm' on life, on marriage, on the Second Amendment, on limited government, on balanced budgets."

To which a reader commented: "How do you get the Independents vote with rhetoric like that?"

But there's a likely glue to the ongoing division within the rightroots: Obama. Last week, Ruffini posted an item addressing one of Rebuild the Party's more ambitious goals: recruiting 5 million online activists who will work toward a common purpose. He cites the proposed auto bailout as "the first outrage of the Obama era."

Aided and prompted by the rightroots, "a functioning RNC," he wrote, "would be able to take a hard line against the bailout-of-choice for the auto industry. Or against insert-Obama-outrage-here. It doesn't really matter. We'll have plenty of issues once these guys actually get in."

It's All About a Movement

A week after the election, and five days after Rebuild the Party was introduced, RNC Chairman Mike Duncan unveiled RepublicanForAReason.com, which he describes as "a grassroots site that Republicans can use to tell us what they think of the party." He says the party has lost the trust of its members and the site "is a big part of understanding and communicating with them." He agrees with Finn that the GOP is viewed "as a party of old white guys."

"And I'm saying that as a 57-year-old white guy." He quickly adds: "But I use technology. I've got three BlackBerrys. I've got a Kindle." He promises that the RNC's Internet division -- headed by Cyrus Krohn, formerly of Microsoft and Yahoo -- will get more resources, calling it "a big priority for the RNC." There's speculation that Duncan wants to run for a second term, though he says he hasn't made up his mind.

Chip Saltsman, who served as chairman of the Tennessee Republican Party and managed Huckabee's presidential campaign, is also weighing a run at the RNC chairmanship. At 40, he's the youngest in the group of names that are being tossed around, which include former senator and actor Fred Thompson, 66, and Katon Dawson, 52, current head of the South Carolina GOP. Saltsman, too, agrees with Finn. "We can't afford to be looked at as the party of the rich old white guy," he says. Like Duncan, he wants to place more emphasis on the party's Web strategy. "There's still a big hole in our game plan, and that's the Internet," he says.

But the Internet is not a panacea.

"This is not just about making the Web central to your strategy. This is about ideas. This is about using the Internet to promote your ideas and build a movement," Finn says. In a span of 30 minutes, she says the word "movement" no fewer than 14 times.

"In this Internet era, it's not enough to run a campaign, you need to lead a movement -- that's what Obama did," she continues. "If you look at their site, their online videos, their online ads, everything they did, it wasn't about 'me, myself and I.' It was about 'we' and 'us.' "

From the moment Obama launched his site, Ruffini took screen shots of what he thought were interesting pages and archived them on his Flickr account. "The breadth of Obama's site was extraordinary," Ruffini says. "The Web site highlighted maybe 10 unique programs in every battleground state -- and this differed from state to state." Later, he points to Obama's record online haul during his 21-month campaign: a half-billion dollars raised from 3 million online donors, 13 million e-mail addresses collected. In a blog posting, he argues that Obama's popular-vote win is partly due to his appeal to young voters, whom he won 66 percent to 32 percent over McCain, exit polls showed.

"It was only eight years ago that Bush and Gore were tied with the youth vote," Ruffini says. "Now young voters are the backbone of Obama's grassroots support."

"And we need to win them back," Finn says. "We must. But for a lot of these young voters who grew up during the Bush era, what they've heard and what they've perceived is that the Republican Party is a party of being against things, rather than a party of solutions and inclusion, rather than a party of individual freedom. We need to correct that. We need to rebuild the party and we'll do that online."