California Conservative

It isn’t a big secret that I’m a big fan of Patrick Ruffini’s because he’s one of the smartest people in the conservative movement. Patrick said something in this post that is vitally important if we’re hoping to rebuild the conservative movement. Here’s what Patrick said that jumped off the page at me:

Being out of power will give conservatives to emerge from under the shadow of the Republican Party. A big reason why the right has stagnated online is that being in power has given the right little of substance to do. All the decisions were being made for us in Washington, everything from where the GOP should stand on immigration to campaign strategy. When everything you need to know about candidate recruitment and how the GOP targets races is written down in a binder at the RNC, there’s little for volunteers to do other than follow orders. That’s not very inspiring to grassroots activists. To appropriate something Soren told me over email once, more stuff for volunteers to do equals more volunteers.

One key principle of teambuilding in business is letting the employees own their projects. That means management setting the goal, then letting the employee or group of employees come up with their own solution. That’s something I encouraged when I was a supervisor. My motto was “Do whatever you want as long as you make me look good at the end of the day.”

We stopped being the party of ideas, which chased volunteers away. Employing a top-down management style where the RNC dictates what we do nationally and the state parties dictate what we do at the state level is the wrong approach because it’s the polar opposite of being activist-based.

Another thing that’s problematic in the RNC’s approach is that they’ve told locals who the candidate is. This resulted in lots of activists getting upset with the RNC because they felt like they were the RNC’s on a state party’s rubberstamp. That isn’t the right model to follow.

Another thing that we’ve done poorly recently is that we haven’t made the best arguments for our policies. What’s worse is that we haven’t focused on the most important issues confronting people. When we make our best arguments on the most important issues confronting people, like the House Republicans did in August, public opinion was with us on an important issue.

That’s understandable for several reasons. First, when we make our best arguments, we’re the smartest people in the room. Second, that’s when we look like leaders. Third and most importantly, that’s when people realize that we’re on their side. There’s an old saying amongst Christian missionaries that say “People don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care. That fits here perfectly because making the best arguments on the most important issues tells people that supporting us is the best thing for them.

In finishing, the day that we abandon our top-down form of seudo-activism and we start thinking issues through and making the best arguments is the day the GOP will be the dominant party again. That’s the goal I intend to work towards. Anyone who wants to join in achieving that goal is welcome to join. There’s always room for more.

Technorati Tags: Reform, Patrick Ruffini, Rebuild the Party, RNC, Grassroots, House Oil Party, Leadership, Majority PArty, Elections

Cross-posted at LetFreedomRingBlog

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 4th, 2008 at 8:12 am and is filed under Activism, Author: Gary Gross, Conservatism, Elections, Energy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.