Saltsman sees new 'playbook' for GOP

Former Huckabee guru says he is 'making calls and taking calls,' considering RNC chair race

Email | Print By Clint Brewer

The man who helped turn former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee into a contender for the GOP presidential nomination might be the person to turn his ailing party’s fortunes around.

Former Huckabee campaign manager and Tennessee native John “Chip” Saltsman said his hat is not formally in the ring to be Republican National Committee chairman, but that he is “making calls and taking calls” concerning the post.

“It’s not official, but I am looking at it,” Saltsman said. “A lot of my pitch is getting back to basics – in putting money and resources back into infrastructure and building at the local level.”

Some of that building, in Saltsman’s vision of a reshaped GOP national campaign apparatus, would mean a combining of traditional state party building coupled with the GOP catching up to a new world of campaigning via the Internet and social networking.

The use of the online social network concept is being largely credited with the effectiveness of Democratic President-Elect Barack Obama’s landslide campaign win over GOP Sen. John McCain. The MyBarackObama.com site allowed volunteers at the local level to access resources like voter registration and volunteer lists as well as campaign talking points to organize local Obama campaign activity in a horizontal fashion free of politics' traditional top-down structure.

“Maybe they were using a new playbook and we were using the old playbook,” Saltsman said. “As the Republican Party, we tend to treat e-mail addresses as press release venue only.  It can be much more complicated and much more effective than that.”

Saltsman said the need for political parties to “build community” online through new social networking platforms will be crucial to the party’s future, saying the GOP could be a “live, breathing organism online.”

“They (Democrats) were able to build that and then to have their own online structure in the field that organized events, got out yard signs and sent people door to door,” Saltsman said.

At the same time, Saltsman suggested the steady push to build the Tennessee Republican Party dating back to his own time as chairman is also the kind of effort needed in all 50 states for the GOP to be successful again in battling for the Congress and presidency.

“I think some of it is doing what we did in Tennessee eight years ago,” Saltsman said, referring to his time as state chairman. “Some of it is strong infrastructure at the local level. It’s about building strong state parties. The strength of the Republican Party resides in states – in strong governors and state office holders, in strong local parties.”

Saltsman is spending time this week in Nashville and then heading to a Republican Governors Association meeting in Florida. He then plans to begin traveling the country in an effort to pursue the RNC chair.