You Lose, You Resign

by Patrick Ruffini :: May 13th, 2008 10:46 pm

There is no sugarcoating tonight’s result in MS-1. Thankfully, the NRCC doesn’t even try, issuing a soberly worded statement from Chairman Tom Cole in lieu of the usual upbeat results memo:

[T]he political environment is such that voters remain pessimistic about the direction of the country and the Republican Party in general. Therefore, Republicans must undertake bold efforts to define a forward looking agenda that offers the kind of positive change voters are looking for. This is something we can do in cooperation with our Presidential nominee, but time is short.

I encourage all Republican candidates, whether incumbents or challengers, to take stock of their campaigns and position themselves for challenging campaigns this fall by building the financial resources and grassroots networks that offer them the opportunity and ability to communicate, energize and turn out voters this election.

The problem with this is that they’re pushing a “change” message with the same faces. The guy at the top of the ticket represents his own kind of change. But if we want 2008 to be more than a “lonely victory” you need a changing of the guard at the leadership and the candidate level.

I’m not going to say that heads roll because of these three elections alone, but if we fail to recapture the House or make surprising headway towards that goal, we need to be pretty firm that the current leadership must resign en masse. Boehner and Blunt have six months to turn this ship around.

In fact, this should become a standing rule: You lose, you resign. We will start winning a lot faster once there are consequences for losing.

That’s how it works in every Parliamentary system. One party loses the election even by a little, and the old guard turns over the keys. It may take two or three tries, but usually this results in leaders who not only talk different but are different. The grassroots needs to work to create this same sort of accountability here. And we need quit outsourcing Congressional elections to the Presidential level, since nationalizing the electon worked real well in MS-1 and LA-6.

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