Ken Blackwell announced Tuesday that the College Republican Leadership endorsed him in his bid for RNC chair. The CRNC is an important organization for college-age Republicans; Lee Atwater, Karl Rove, Morton Blackwell, and Grover Norquist were all former leaders of it.

The group’s national leaders, Charlie Smith, Blake Harris, Dan Carlson, Esther Clark and all state leaders sent an e-mail to the Republican National Committee in which they announced their support for Blackwell. In this e-mail they state: “After two difficult election cycles our party is at a crossroads.  We have obligations to our ideals and our constituents to evaluate our strengths and weakness, successes and failures, and set ourselves on a path of renewal and revitalization.    We must take this opportunity to elect a leader with a bold vision and the strength to carry it through.  We need a leader that will stop allowing the Republican Party to surrender to the other party on campus and online. It is our opinion and the opinion of a large part of our organization that, of the many qualified candidates for RNC Chairman, the candidate best suited to take on these new challenges is Ken Blackwell.”

“Ken understands the importance of increasing our outreach to young and first time voters who will be making formative choices in the next few elections that will shape their voting habits for the rest of their lives. We cannot afford to continue to ignore an entire generation of voters. Ken also understands that we must increase our capabilities online if we’re going to inform and persuade voters effectively and remain competitive with Internet and email fundraising.

“We believe that Ken Blackwell has the convictions to make him a great spokesman for our party and that he will drive us forward towards successes in elections at all levels of government. That belief is further strengthened after watching his performance in the debate yesterday. As the leaders of tomorrow’s Republican Party we respectfully ask that you consider supporting Ken and cast a vote for the next generation of Republicans.”

The announcement came shortly after Blackwell himself proposed a “conservative resurgence plan.” The goal of the plan (PDF) is to enable conservatives to take on liberals on a state-by-state level. Although the plan is a reasonably long read, I encourage you to take the time to read it in its entirety nonetheless. Blackwell is one of the favorites for RNC chair – my own hunch is that he will indeed win the election – and this document could very well function as the new RNC constitution under his leadership.

The entire plan is based on ten basic premises, the most important of which are:

- ”We must inspire a new generation of conservatives into our party by drawing contrasts with Democrats regarding these principles, values, and ideas.”

- “We must invest heavily in strong state and local party organizations so that our party has the capacity to organize the electorate and recruit new volunteers and donors. This includes providing seed money to party organizations that lack startup resources and providing speakers to all state party organizations.”

- “We must have the technological infrastructure in place to harness the grassroots energy that will be created when the public turns against the liberal democrats in Washington.”

- “We must have regional strategies and specific plans for each region and state. We must invest resources in redeveloping our party organizations in the Northeast, never take the South for granted, win over the Reagan Democrats in the Midwest, and compete for Hispanic and Asian-American votes in the West.”

- “We must make a serious effort to be competitive with African Americans and other minorities across the country.”

- “The 2010 midterm elections and the resulting battles over redistricting will shape the future of both political parties. We must ‘win’ the redistricting battles. Those fights will determine the alignment of our state parties for the next decade.”

He then gives “three major benchmarks that have to be met by the RNC in 2010 in order for the conservative resurgence plan to be a success.” This benchmarks are:

1. 50 Strong State Parties equipped with the technical tools and skills necessary to be successful down to precinct-level. In order to achieve this Blackwell suggests: “We must have precinct leaders identified in 90% of targeted precincts in all 50 states and properly trained with organizational software.”

2. Increase in the number of Federal Republican Officeholders which he later explains as holding “onto the Senate seats we currently control with some advancement, and mak[ing] significant gains in the House.”

3. Addition of more Republican Governors and more Republican State Legislators as we prepare for redistricting. This goal is met, he explains, “if we draw even with the Democrats in total number of Governors and increase the number of state legislative chambers held by Republicans.”

Although redistricting is a boring subject to the public at large it is nonetheless of vital importance for Republicans to win this important battle. 

Blackwell also writes that all starts or falls with inspiring and motivating ‘the base.’ Without a motivated base, he argues, the GOP can reform all it wants but it will not have the ground game necessary to win elections against Democrats. “The RNC Chairman must lead by articulating a clear conservative vision that paints in bold strokes, not pale pastels. Doing so will rally a dispirited Republican base and present a vision that stands in stark contrast to the failed left-wing policies of the Obama Administration. This is the first and most important step we can take to rebuild the ground game of the Republican Party,” he says.

“In addition to touting the economic and employment benefits of lower taxes, we must once again begin educating the public about the moral superiority of limited government over the concept of big government socialism. At some point, it becomes morally wrong for government to take too large a percentage of a person’s income. We can all argue about what that percentage is, but we must make the point that big government socialism is morally wrong. This is a discussion that we should be having on a year-round basis with the American people.”

This means that the RNC has to “strongly encourage Republican members of Congress to vote against tax increases, deficit spending and bailouts.” 

Blackwell is rather obviously right about inspiring the base; one cannot hope for electoral success if the base is lukewarm about the party. Interestingly enough, Blackwell seems to focus on fiscal conservative issues rather than social conservative ones. This could very well mean that the Republican Party will become less social conservative under Blackwell’s leadership or, at the very least, more focused on fiscal conservative issues.

Another major point Blackwell addresses in his conservative resurgence plan is that the Republican Party has to become “the party of ideas” again. There was a time when good policy proposals were suggested by the GOP, which had intellectuals and think tanks working and thinking for it on a basis seldom seen before. New ideas, ideas that actually worked, were proposed by Republicans, who were then able to explain these ideas to the American people in words everybody could understand.

Although Blackwell is certainly right about need for new ideas, one wonders whether he truly understands the importance of it considering this tidbit: “This doesn’t take a new bureaucracy within the RNC – it simply takes one or two sharp policy people to evaluate the ideas that are currently developed in conservative think-tanks across the country.” 

If one considers the development of ideas of crucial importance, appointing “one or two sharp policy people to evaluate the ideas that are currently developed in conservative think-tanks across the country” will not suffice. It will need more than that; perhaps Blackwell could talk to New Gingrich about the matter; I am sure that the former leader of Republicans in the U.S. House of Representatives can explain to Blackwell how to create an organization that develops and communicates new ideas on a regular basis. The RNC needs to hire five (or so) great thinkers who work on developing new policy plans 24/7 and it needs to encourage others (outside and inside the party) to develop policy plans as well; the winner of the policy competition should get a grand prize (money or something else).

A major key of a comeback is, according to Blackwell, to make political regional even local. The RNC should stop telling states how to run their state and their campaigns. Every local Republican Party (branch) should get all the infrastructure it needs (and requests) to organize the base and to expand it without direct RNC interference. The RNC will, under the former secretary of state of Ohio, keep an eye on this local departments and learn from them; other states will be informed about the strategies, tactics and techniques used by the successful state but they will not be forced to simply copy said strategies, etc.

Lastly (for this article; he makes more points in his resurgence plan), Blackwell believes that the RNC has to improve its technological infrastructure. “The party that dominates technology,” Blackwell writes, “is positioned to win.”

“Republicans dominated talk radio and direct mail in the 1980’s and 1990’s. Those advantages allowed our party to flourish despite Democrat advantages on broadcast news. The Internet is the most important new technology since the home television. Just as John Kennedy won largely due to his superiority in televised debates, Obama won at least partly due to his ability to harness the Internet to organize a superior ground game and raise large sums of money online for relatively little cost,” he explains. “Once we have inspired the Republican electorate, we will need to have the technological infrastructure to manage their activities and requests.

“We must dominate new technologies in the 21st Century just as we dominated direct mail and talk radio in the 20th Century. This will require a CTO (Chief Technology Officer) of the RNC that is senior level staff. Furthermore, the entire E-Campaign Department must be integrated with the Political Department so that the RNC operates as one being rather than multiple appendages.”

In order to do so he wants to “organize the party from the ground up online by recruiting, enabling and engaging our ground troops, in other words, our supporters – our donors, volunteers and advocates, as well as, our first line of command – our precinct leaders… We will immediately implement a plan to identify, recruit, and empower hundreds of thousands of precinct organizers across the country. We will ensure their success by giving them the training and tools that they need to fundraise and to recruit and deploy our volunteer troops. We will goal, measure and provide incentives for the precinct leaders and those who perform will be rewarded accordingly. All of this will be done by working with state party organizations and methodologies that work in their state and that they enthusiastically approve.”

The position of Chief Technology Officer is an interesting one; it is undoubtedly true that technology is key in this day in age to grand electoral success. One of the major reasons president-elect Barack Obama was able to beat the much praised Clinton political machine- and later that of the GOP – was due to his tremendous online presence. “The CTO will be charged with automating the processes of all our functions and distributing those processes across the Internet to our geographically dispersed field organization and volunteers. For example, the CTO would be responsible for internet-enabling the job of the precinct leaders and the fundraisers in addition to working with e-communications technologies, e.g., email, websites, online phone banks, that the eCampaign department provides.”

Until now, the eCampaign has been an independent part of the Republican Party’s campaign. It has always been ignored as much as possible, pushed into a little corner where it could do nothing to help Republicans win elections. 2008 proved this approach to the eCampaign to be a mistake. Neglecting the eCampaign equals political suicide. Appointing a CTO is a first but major step for the GOP in the right direction.

It should not, however, end there. The CTO should receive all the funds necessary to fight Democrats on their own turf (the Internet). He will need have to be one of the leading figures of the Republican Party as a whole and he should be part of all major meetings. The eCampaign should be integrated into the rest of the party.

One of the main goals of Blackwell’s CTO will be to help precincts organize. The CTO and Blackwell will do everything in their power to enable them to do so effectively. Furthermore, the CTO will make it easier for individual Republicans, not the ones who are currently in charge of the party but your average Republican who would like to become more active, to volunteer and to meet in their neighborhoods, towns and cities in order to spread and communicate a conservative message to fellow voters thereby helping Republican candidates win elections.

As I wrote yesterday, Blackwell was one of the few candidates who impressed me greatly during the debate hosted by Americans for Tax Reform. I published an article today arguing that he is not very popular, to put it mildly, in his own state, or at least not among independents let alone Democrats. Nonetheless, his paper shows that he is very, very serious about his candidacy and that he understands most (not all) issues. 

Conclusion: Blackwell proved himself to be, perhaps, the most serious candidate for RNC chair of all. I’m waiting to hear something from Michael Steele, who impressed me greatly with his knowledge, energy and enthusiasm as well (the last two are characteristics Blackwell misses).