Fighting 21st Century Battles With A 20th Century Party

Mitch Berg has a good post and interesting comment thread on What The Hell Is Wrong With The Minnesota GOP?:

The GOP, nationwide and in Minnesota, needs to learn from its mistakes, to decentralize its thinking, and most of all get better at doing its job.

It needs to reward initiative; it needs to seek out, reward, cultivate and channel ideas and energy that come from outside the party's bureaucracy, rather than getting paranoid about them.

Being this state's genuine big tent party, it needs to come up with a way to get its message out, without turning on and eating carriers of other messages. It needs to focus on the parts the party agrees on, rather than ripping itself to shreds over the things it doesn't.

If the MN GOP hopes to compete in 2010 and beyond, the time for reform and reorganization is now. New ideas and new leaders are needed to attract new faces to the party now so that we can hope to turn out new GOP voters in future elections.