I’m a woman in her mid-30’s with a pierced nose; I’ve been a Republican all my life, and I’ve volunteered for various campaigns since I was about 19 (although I got my nose ring later!). I’m involved with a local conservative group that meets every month, gets speakers, periodically has co-ordinated events with other local conservative groups, etc.

I’ve expressed a lot of frustration with the party and it falls on deaf ears. Everyone seems so shaken and so frightened that we’ll really lose the hearts and minds battle that they are in protectionist mode. When I criticised Dave Reichert for not being conservative enough and supporting illegal immigration and making conciliatory noises about various other things, I was told I didn’t understand, that he’s one of the few GOPs around (I live in the WA state), and we needed to *preserve* his seat. In other words, he needed to talk out of both sides of his mouth in order to not lose his seat. I argued we won’t make gains if we’re on defence, and we need to make the case for being a Republican to people.

It was an eye-opener; the GOP (at least around here) appear to be afraid of getting smacked down. There’s HUGE opportunities to make people realise our message is in line with their goals and we just don’t do it, and it appears to be because we are afraid of failure, so we just try to legalise an illegal class of people (who are highly religious), and claim the party will die otherwise. This is idiotic.

Young families would benefit from our fiscal conservative message, young women from our support of the 2nd Amendment, minorities from the personal independence message the Republican party has (or at least used to have). The GOP is too meek; we don’t want to be mean, we don’t want to be criticised or labeled greedy, so we accept that ‘the Dems have the minority vote’. How can anyone follow us if we don’t appear to have faith in the strength of our own message? We’re doomed ourselves to the very fate we have feared.

I hope Michael Steele becomes a galvanising force for disaffected members of the party who have long been frustrated with our leader’s eagerness to compromise our principles away for the sake of ‘bipartisanship’ and long weekends at Teddy’s beach house during summer recess. We need to start contributing locally, building up a good farm team in our states and push through this cr@p.

California State Assemblyman Chuck DeVore has recently declared his candidacy to run for Barbara Boxer’s U.S. Senate seat in 2010 (www.chuckdevore.com). As a Californian, this is one election I’d love to see the RNC put their full support behind. This would be such a coup for the GOP if we can capture this seat and remove the extreme far-left lib Boxer! But with California being a majority Democratic state, it will require the national support of our party to help pull this off and get Assemblyman Chuck DeVore elected to the U.S. Senate.

I am so done with professional politicians and the wealthy guys who pull their strings. Be nice for a bunch of average amateurs to get the jobs for a term of two.

The national party spends money on contestable races. Waxman is not going anywhere as he is liberal and therefore immune. He could be caught plunging a knife into the bloody corpse of a cheerleader and the news would comment on how he was trying a new kind of “knifeblade CPR”. The national party knows this. They don’t have enough money to defend their weak candidates and challenge the D candidates who are weak, much less spend money on a long odds attack on such an invulnerable candidate.

Term limits would be a great approach, but no congress would pass them, and it is not clear that even if passed and signed into law, that such a law would be enforceable as constitutionally, no congress may bind a subsequent congress’ actions.