Regaining Republican ideals

The Republican Revival Will Start in the States

Excerpt:

Mr. Barbour is fanatical about the need for the GOP to "to do the hard work to build strong and self-reliant" state and local chapters of the party that are in such disrepair. "Now is our chance when we're out of power to build back up from the bottom, to have a participatory, inclusive process for letting people get involved in our party. Barack Obama proved something that I've seen time and time again: if you'll give people a chance to participate in politics they'll knock your door down. And the Democrats did a whole lot better job of that than us this time."

Another worrisome trend he mentions is the youth vote. "We've got young people who voted for Obama by better than a 2-to-1 margin. The data is very clear, that when people vote in their first two presidential elections for the same party, more than 80% of those people are going to stay with that party for the rest of their life, barring some big event that changes it."

This gives the GOP four years to learn to communicate with the iPod generation. The party, he says, must figure out how to tap new media and new messaging to reach out and touch 20-somethings.

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In the end, he advises, Republicans can only win if they rediscover the power and voter appeal of innovative and reform-minded solutions to the nation's ills. "If we're going to have a party that gets the White House back before we fall totally into socialism, we need to persuade voters that our market-based solutions work, and government mostly doesn't. And we're going to have to apply these principles to a whole new set of policy challenges."

The best people to do that, he insists, are the governors. He reminds me that in the 1990s it was governors like John Engler of Michigan, Fife Symington of Arizona, and Tommy Thompson of Wisconsin who led the way on supply-side tax cutting, welfare reform and economic development. I ask him if there are any future Ronald Reagans out there in the states. He mentions Bobby Jindal, Mark Sanford, Jim Douglas and, of course, Sarah Palin. "This has to be a bottom-up rebuilding process," he says. "Republican solutions are going to flow from the states, not from Washington."

Comment: Note mention of Bobby Jindal!