Disclaimer, right off the top: I’m unlikely to vote for the Republican Prez candidate against Obama’s reelection unless he screws up AND the Republicans offer someone appealing; and the last time I voted for a Republican Prez candidate was in 1980. So no, I’m not a Republican or a person who votes Republican often, salt all that follows with the appropriate grains of NaCl you deem appropriate.
I think the future of the Republican Party is quite a bit up for grabs at the moment, and early grassroots efforts and networking could make a lot of difference.
I think that although there is an obvious contingent that, left to its own devices, would like to run Sarah Palin or (more likely) Huckabee or Brownback or Jeff Sessions, but someone very strongly conservative especially socially conservative… there is plenty of opportunity to carve out a different support platform for a differently poised Republican candidate to seek the nom, and that, furthermore, the Palin/Huckabee/Brownback/Sessions platform is not likely to serve the Republican Party’s future. It will win less votes each season, give or take the charisma of the specific individual.
Your best run, IMHO, is probably an economic conservative / social moderate of the Mitt Romney persuasion. I don’t particularly recommand that specific individual, necessarily, mind you. Maybe Kit Bond, or Kay Bailey Hutchinson. Of course any candidate’s candidacy is tempered by how they frame it. John McCain woud have been perceived as being of that ilk (and the far-right social conservative voters didn’t see him as one of theirs, really), but he did what he could to signal that he was with them. I’m thinking a Republican brave enough to do the political triangulation thing mirror-image to what Bill Clinton did with Queen Latifah in election season, a push-away brushoff of that faction as a message to the middle.
An initiative more likely to actually lure my vote (although, again, probably not against Obama as an incumbent Dem unless he fucks up), and actually likely to eat the swingvoters for lunch and take away a substantial part of the traditional Dem vote (depending on who the Dems field…spectacularly less so against a Dem incumbent) is a true Republican moderate ticket, more conservative than anything the Dems would field but just barely. Push the Dems into sounding like “me too” or “left field”. In previous years I said Olympia Snowe / Pete Domenici and you’d haul in a victory of 400 points. Ol’ Pete’s off the slate nowadays but the times being what they are, what if you ran Snowe with Linda Lingle? Yeah, put a pair of women on the ticket. Go for the middle. Every voter whose soul belongs to Fred Phelps that you lose will be replaced by a moderate voter who soon enough will be thinking the Dems are complacent, too leftwing, or too influcenced by their leftwing. More conservative policy notions will come from the same party’s Congressional leadership and RNC, tempered by the moderate Prez. On second thought I’m not sure this is not your best run.
Anywhich… if YOU do not network, if YOU do not invest, liaison, and freaking PUSH, the Sarah Palin faction is gonna drive your party’s agenda in 2012.
And why the heck would I care? Because…
a) I am tired of them Donkeys taking my vote for granted; compete, willya? Obama looks good but won’t be in office forever and the world is full of Kerrys and Edwardses; and
b) America is a better place with a political alternative always viably being the loyal opp. The far-right social conservatives have shot their wad. (I hope). You making the Republicans serious contenders will keep the Dems on their toes. I like it that way. Don’t let your party become temporarily marginal-in-the-wilderness.
c) OK Dammit, I have an inner Republican dying to come out. I did campaign work for Pete Domenici as a teenager. I voted for Reagan in '80. I thought Jack Kemp was cool. I believe governments should not spend money they do not have. I beleive in social change, quite fervently, but when it comes to finance I believe our understandings are thin and we should go cautiously lest we kill the entire engine and mess up everyone. And I am totally not a Marxist; whatever is indeed wrong with the market economy (a lot, I think), it will not be fixed by letting it run and then redistributing the income in ways that do indeed kill that engine, on both ends. And if you’re an economic conservative you know DAMN good and well what I’m talking about with no fuither elab. Umm, you should be embarrassed that the Democratic Party now has more cred than the Republican for fiscal responsibility. Seriously. You gonna let them KEEP THAT in order to let Bible Spice and the EndTimes Singers run for office? Take your freaking party back! Turn your party into a party you personally would feel GOOD about voting for, and changes are good someone else, aside from Bible Spice and the Endtimes Singers that is, will feel that way too.
Don’t just stand there, go organize something!