NoVaPolitics.com

I blogged about Ken Mehlman’s comment in Part 1 about the GOP neglecting the candidates and the issues (people and ideas) and concentrating on technology (hardware).

He is not the only one. Rod Martin writes:

For most of my life, a small minority of us Republicans (notably Newt Gingrich and Morton Blackwell, plus acolytes such as me) agitated, cajoled and worked for the day when our party would take seriously the “ground war”…

We argued this point year after year, to no avail, until the closeness of the 2000 election and the rise of Karl Rove forced the issue. And having then won our debate, our party won too: an historic mid-term in 2002 and a seemingly impossible sweep in 2004.

Which is where it all went awry.

Like kids with a new toy, our Republican leadership became mesmerized with their turnout program. It wasn’t just a playhouse: it could be a fort, it could be a spaceship, it could be a secret hideout for the cowboys fighting their toy Indians.

It could, in fact, be absolutely anything.

Anything except a message.

And that’s how the majority was lost.

In other words, having ignored the necessity of hardware previously, the GOP went nuts in the other direction and thought hardware (or technology) could solve it all. But relying on technology while pushing power-hungry, unattractive candidates and no message but “we’re less evil” has been demonstrated to be a losing recipe. More from Martin:

A turnout effort cannot be better than the message motivating the turnout. This is Rule Number One.

For most of two years — and on certain things longer than that — Republican Congressional leaders settled for a message of “those Democrats are worse than we are” and “look at our new toy.” They pointed out that Democrats had no ideas and that you can’t beat something with nothing. It never occurred to them that Democrats might beat nothing with nothing.

Superior turnout machine (or hardware, technology or whatever one cares to call it) is still vital, but the sine qua non are good candidates and sound issues (people and ideas). The next challenge I see for people involved in hardware/technology/machine is this: how do they design and implement a political mobilization system that will encourage and recruit upstanding, moral and philosophically-principled candidates who will not be corrupted by power? And how will they fashion a system that will feed a continual renewal of such people into the system rather than relying on incumbency, which inevitably erodes principles?

When the GOP figures that one out, and only then, will it be able to forge that fabled permanent conservative governing majority.