David Plouffe has a list.
It was Plouffe (rhymes with bluff) who gathered the president's unprecedented thirteen-million-name contact
list, which has grown into a fulsome pulsing beast, and it is Plouffe who now owns it and keeps it under lock and key.
Plouffe sent those thirteen million people an e-mail in mid-November and they replied, "Yes, I still want to be
involved, and yes, David Plouffe, I'll have house parties when you tell me to. Here is who I am socioeconomically
and socially. I am boxers; my next-door neighbor is briefs."
Now the president has instructed him to make that list a new lever of government.
"The fact that the Republican brand is in trouble – and has been since at least 2006 –
is attributable not only to the lack of governmental oversight by We the People, but by the lack of oversight targeting
the political party hierarchy by rank-and-file Republicans. The GOP allowed itself to be co-opted – to a great extent
– by inside-the-beltway political operatives that cared more about winning elections than advancing Republican principles.
To
recap, aside for its staunch stance against slavery and its support of the Missouri Compromise, the original platform of the Republican Party circa 1856 establishes that the Republican Party stood for:
▪ A rededication of government to constitutional
principles, philosophies and limitations
▪ A strong, prudent and principled
national security
▪ A well-maintained infrastructure
And perhaps the most important and defining provision,
“RESOLVED, That we invite the affiliation and cooperation of the men of all parties, however differing
from us in other respects, in support of the principles herein declared; and believing that the spirit of our institutions
as well as the Constitution of our country, guarantees liberty of conscience and equality of rights among citizens, we oppose
all legislation impairing their security.”
Simply stated, the platform of 1856 created the “big tent”
party that Republican National Committee members say they quest for today by limiting the planks in the platform and by employing
the understanding that it is more important to safeguard an individual’s right to advance their own “special interest”
agenda (please understand that the term “special interest” doesn’t necessarily mean something unsavory)
than it is to champion that special interest as a part of the party’s platform.
This concept is brilliance in
practice....
In re-branding the Republican Party, the leadership would serve its members – and the country
– best by refusing to expand the platform to include special interest planks and, instead, returning to the limited
plank platform of its roots, where the party championed individual freedom and individual responsibility and engagement where
issues of societal mores were concerned, not the legislation of ideological solutions or social engineering. The GOP must
resign itself to defending an individual’s right to affect change, not to being the vehicle for that change....
In re-branding itself, it would wise for the GOP to take the opportunity afforded by this unique
moment in American history to re-invent itself. The Republican National Committee – along with Republican organizations
at every level – must re-structure itself to be less the inside-the-beltway command and control entity (an entity that
mandates candidates and strong-arms platforms and agendas, which it has most certainly evolved into) and re-dedicate itself
to becoming more of a mammoth and viciously efficient support and organizational tool that embraces candidates sent up from
the grassroots; Conservatives re-awakened to their constitutionally mandated civic responsibility who have taken it upon themselves
to run for office in 2010, 2012 and through the future.
If the Republican Party can wrap its brain around the strategic
brilliance of this re-invention, it will position itself to be the preferred political party of those in the Tea Party Movement;
it will be the avenue and political structure through which the Tea Party Movement advances their preferred candidates."
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