Vision

We cannot win elections of the future by employing campaign practices of the past.

I'm alarmed as I'm sure you are with the direction Colorado politics has taken during the last three election cycles. We have lost the Governor's seat, both Senate seats, five Congressional seats and our majorities in the State House and Senate. Rather than being discouraged and disengaged, I see and hear a growing sense of purpose among many Republicans. But mere hope for our joint vision of the future is not a method to get us there. Talking about what we stand for and what we can become is not enough. Saving our State has to become grounded in action - positive aggressive action guided by our vision and consistent with our values. We must all think and act purposefully.

• Our message needs to be updated and consistent with our values while not changing our principles.
• We need leaders who are personally empowered by technology. To lead effectively our current and future leaders must understand and be a part of our web based society. We must use social networking to enhance our productivity, our ability to monitor and influence, and our ability to lead.
• Fundraising. We must learn to first emulate and then improve upon the Democrat's fundraising techniques.
• We cannot allow ourselves to be focused on and stuck perfecting campaign strategies of the past because it is all that we know.
• Candidate development and support.
• We must train our future leaders.

Liberal elements outside our Party suggest that our values are a thing of the past. They want us to become "Democrat Light" and desert our conservative philosophy. I firmly believe that the opposite is true. We need to find new ways of expressing our ideals that resonate with the entire Republican spectrum and also speak to Independent registered voters. I firmly believe that the majority of Americans agree with our Conservative principles. It is our fault that we don't convey our beliefs in an understandable fashion. We can and will re-craft our message. The future of our Nation and our State is in grave danger if we don't.

Information technology has prompted a paradigm shift in how we learn and communicate. Many older generation leaders mistakenly believe that the internet and social media is nothing but a new technology for a "shout" campaign. On the contrary, voters become empowered to research for themselves and have conversations with other like minds over great distances in real time. Voters can no longer be expected to simply believe what we tell them to believe. Our leaders must be personally empowered by technology. They need to understand and embrace the many new dimensions of cyberspace.

We have made some improvements in raising funds for candidates in recent years, but we are still far, far behind our competition. I refuse to accept the excuse that we will never match the Democrats in Colorado until we find a few big donors. We must first become the Party with a compelling vision for the future with a well articulated plan, and then we will be successful at using every tactic, strategy and technology that a modern fundraising campaign requires.

We must actively recruit candidates for all races from the local courthouse to our nation's capitol. Our candidates should reflect the wide range of age, gender, race, and ethnicity differences found in our State. The State Party then has an obligation to properly train and support those candidates to not only win their elections, but to also govern wisely.

We should not be boasting about how many phone calls our volunteers made or how many doors they knocked on unless it led to success. This trap of measurement in terms of an old paradigm is one that we must avoid. We cannot modernize without first challenging our underlying assumptions. We must perform a full and thorough assessment of our strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats before deciding upon our path for the future. I recommend that we have regional summits roughly approximating the congressional districts in area, followed up by a State wide summit to jointly chart our course.

We must work to grow our successors. We are in times of great change which creates a pronounced need to do more leader development. If we fail to develop our future leaders, we may win today but we will lose tomorrow. We must train our future leaders through on-the-job experience, education, training, and guided self development.