Five Big Ideas For The Next NJ GOP Chair

Rank and file NJ Republicans are
damned angry -- and they
have every right to be!

After one of the most humiliating defeats for Republicans in the history of the Garden State, the New Jersey Republican Party is in disarray and the air is saturated with a litany of losing gubernatorial candidates: Ciattarelli, Gudagno, Forrester, Schundler, Courter, Bateman and on and on. And we haven't even mentioned the hapless herd of US Senate candidates in a state where the GOP hasn't won a senate seat in more than half a century. Whew!

The state party is now sitting not in a mere valley but in a giant, burnt out crater, much of it of its own making. The party's chair and executive director have both mercifully resigned effective the end of the year, thank goodness. We don't know who the new state chair will be. We can only hope that it will be a compelling fresh face with a new ideas and a completely new focus.

Here are Five Big Suggestions for the new chair:

1) Clean house. Get rid of everybody who has led us to this sorry station -- dump all of them, especially all the high-priced consultants who've enriched themselves at the expense of the rest of us.

2) Initiate a zero based game plan. Wipe the slate clean of all previous notions and assumptions. Clear out the cobwebs in the musty old attic of the state GOP that poses as a strategy center or brain; open the windows and begin not with a remodel but a total rebuild.

3) Listen to the rank and file. Halt the relentless analyzing of the dreary details of defeat and take the party to the party faithful, where they live. The foot soldiers of the party have worked hard and have been ill-served by the state organization for too long. Convene open-ended listening sessions in north, central and south Jersey for grassroots Republicans. Welcome them, feed them and listen to what they have to say. Let everyone be heard and dismiss no idea or suggestion out of hand. Sit and listen until all are heard!

4) Demand more of every current elected GOP official in the state and every party chair. Serve notice that you expect them to get down to the business of building a new NJ GOP. If need be, enlist the national GOP to help fund this effort to rebuild the party from the top down and from the bottom up. The time for place holder officers and ceremonial party "leaders" who sponsor meaningless legislation or hand out irrelevant proclamations is over. Fewer ribbon cutters and more rabble rousers who will take on the DemocRATS -- that's what we need!

5) Develop message discipline. Devise a clear road to victory with an unambiguous mission statement and a simple, concise message -- two or three points, tops that ordinary people can understand, hammered home relentlessly. Synthesize all the ideas and give us one party, one voice, one message, and make it clear, once and for all, that senseless, petty, intra-party warfare will no longer be tolerated. 

None of this will be easy. The road ahead will be arduous and old ways and the enablers of those ways will have be jettisoned. But there is really no alternative. The NJ GOP must chart a dramatic, audacious new path now or wither away. The choice is really that simple!